The Impact of Food Insecurity
Results revealed that those who worried about hunger in the prior year had greater incidence of diabetes. “People experiencing food insecurity can also get caught in a negative reinforcing cycle," said CJ Nikolaus, Lead Study Author and Assistant Professor with WSU's Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health or IREACH. "When food insecurity is associated with a diet that contributes to disease risk, [it] creates additional health care expenses, stressing a household's economic resources and deepening food insecurity. It's really important to ensure that individuals who are experiencing food insecurity are able to be identified and that they have resources made available to them to be able to break the cycle."Nikolaus continued, "When we look at the data 10 years later, we do see this separation in prevalence of diabetes. Those that experienced risk of food insecurity at young adulthood are more likely to have diabetes in middle adulthood. Eating according to the dietary guidelines tends to cost more money. It may cost more time. It's not always accessible to households that have limitations such as transportation to sources of lower cost, nutritionally dense food."
However, there was one positive finding: Government Intervention programs, like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), were efficient in turning around health outcomes.
