The Food Stamp Diet: Increasingly Popular, but How Healthy?
Ria Misra
Contributor
Posted:
12/1/09
As this holiday weekend wrapped up, The New York Times posted an update on the rising number of Americans dependent on food stamps. According to the Times, one in eight Americans are currently on food stamps, and the majority of them are children, with one in four youngsters receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). If you calculate the number of children who will have been on at some point before they reach the age of 20, it moves up to (approximately) half. But, with both a marked rise in the number of Americans using food stamps and increased awareness of the importance of diet in both health and health care costs, I was left with a question: How healthy is the diet that food stamp benefits afford?
The average SNAP benefit in 2008 -- $101 per person per month, or about $227 per household -- works out to a little over $3 a day, or $1.12 per meal. It's clear that the amount budgeted for food is tight, particularly for families trying to eat a healthy diet with lots of fruits and vegetables.
Federal dietary guidelines recommend five to nine servings of fruit and vegetables a day, with an emphasis on dark green, orange and leafy vegetables. But a study by the American Dietetic Association of food shoppers in California suggests that meeting the fruit-vegetable guidelines would eat up 43-70 percent of a low-income family's total food budget. That certainly doesn't leave much left over for other recommended, and often expensive foods, including proteins, dairy, healthy fats or grains -- and it also represents a significant jump over what the average American household spends (15-18 percent of its food budget) on fruits and vegetables.
Skimping on fruits and vegetables for cheaper carbohydrates, fast foods and starches has its costs, as a recent joint study from the University of Michigan and Ohio State University suggests. Researchers found that Americans who used food stamps had an average body mass index 1.15 points higher than those who didn't -- and they noted that women accounted for almost all of that difference.
With more than 12 percent of the population using SNAP (as well as the 17 million U.S. households operating in a state of perennial food insecurity, where they are either on the verge of running out of food or do run out of food) providing additional credits to buy fruits and vegetables or to be used at farmers' markets could have a significant impact not only on the national health, but on obesity-related health care costs.