SNAP participants in low-income households, especially those that live in food deserts, may not be able to meet the nutrition levels set by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a new study finds.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the nation’s largest nutrition program, helping 41 million participants afford “nutritious food essential to health and well-being.”
The case study set out to examine whether SNAP participants would be able to afford a healthy diet based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ (DGA) recommended nutritional values. The US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services created the DGA to advise Americans on what they should eat and drink to meet nutrient needs, promote health, and prevent disease.
“Healthy eating is a critical problem, especially within low-income communities where there’s a combination of economic and geographic constraints making healthy and affordable food less attainable,” says Nitesh Chawla, professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society Engineering at the University of Notre Dame.
“Individuals working within these constraints live in food deserts, and they have to consider multiple factors as they make decisions about their family’s diet.”
As a baseline, the researchers used the maximum SNAP allotment offered for a single person in Indiana as of October 2021, which was $250 per month. They divided this amount by day to determine what a person’s daily budget would be. Then the team created a linear programming model that considers product nutrition and price for items available within a nationwide grocery store chain in South Bend.
“We found that people essentially make trade-offs based on the information they have to try to stretch their funds and maximize nutrition,” says Ronald Metoyer, professor of computer science and engineering and vice president and associate provost for teaching and learning.
“Our idea for this study was to use computation to aggregate all of the relevant information (e.g., inventory, prices, and nutritional content) and use optimization to make those choices.”
Researchers took into consideration the cost per serving for a meal and the different diet guidelines for men and women ages 31-50, while also minimizing the cost of the diet however possible. Although they found it was possible to create a realistic woman’s diet that fits the monetary allotment of SNAP and the nutritional needs of the DGA, it was not possible to do the same for men.
The team also analyzed the trade-off between cost and nutritional value specifically for nutrients that Americans tend to overconsume: sodium, saturated fat, and added sugars. To do this, they set the DGA’s parameters aside and selected only the cheapest food options to meet the SNAP budget. The researchers found a direct correlation between sodium and cost—as the cost of groceries decreases, the amount of sodium consumed increases.
The hardest DGA parameters to meet on a SNAP budget were daily vitamin and mineral intake needs, the researchers note.
“What we found was vitamins and minerals are very difficult to actually hit the dietary guidelines on,” says Joe Germino, a doctoral student in the Lucy Institute’s DIAL Lab who is advised by Chawla.
“You have to make a conscious decision to go and find food items that are cheap enough and actually match your budget. It just adds another layer of complexity—to an already difficult problem when you’re living in a food desert.”
Census data has identified 11 areas in St. Joseph County that can be identified as food deserts, or where a significant amount of people live more than a mile from the nearest supermarket. Residents living in and around the area have to consider the distance to full-service grocery stores as well as their access to transportation to purchase healthy foods.
These barriers are even more difficult to overcome for low-income households, which could create a higher reliance on alternative food sources such as food pantries. Although the per-person budget for SNAP recipients has increased since this study was conducted, due to other economic constraints such as inflation researchers believe that the results still apply for those relying on SNAP support today.
“The reason we chose South Bend is because we have areas that are considered food deserts and we are seeing this lack of food access happening within our own community,” says coauthor Annalisa Szymanski, a graduate scholar advised by Metoyer.
The study, published in Frontiers in Big Data, is just one way Notre Dame researchers are leveraging technology to tackle this national challenge of food access and insecurity through the Food Information Networks (FINS) project.
The project will culminate with an app that employs optimization methods to recommend and suggest healthier food items to people based on their dietary goals and their budgets. In the spring, researchers will pilot a version of the app in Rum Village, a neighborhood of South Bend. The goal is to test the app to see how that solution helps overcome transportation constraints. The pilot will partner with local Walmart grocery stores.
“Through the pilot, we’re testing to see if we promote different suggestions for healthier food products in the app, will that influence how people are eating? Or what if they know there is a healthier product on sale?” Szymanski says. “We want to see how this technology, when considering both dietary goals and budget, could realistically impact eating habits.”
The researchers are also looking into how the FINS project could leverage artificial intelligence, such as large language models, to create personalized diet recommendations.
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded the work.
Source: Notre Dame
