Pricing Strategies to Encourage Availability, Purchase, and Consumption of Healthy Foods and Beverages: A Systematic Review

This review looks at recently published studies (2000-2016) conducted in real-world settings on how changes in food prices can affect access, purchasing, and consumption of foods, especially healthy foods and beverages. The studies focused on individuals or stores in middle- and high-income countries, and food pricing alone or in combination with other strategies (e.g. food More

Deal or No Deal? The Prevalence and Nutritional Quality of Price Promotions Among U.S. Food and Beverage Purchases

This study examines trends in the prevalence of price promotions among packaged food and beverage purchases, differences in prevalence by household race/ethnicity or income, and the association between price promotions and the nutritional profile of purchases. The cross-sectional study uses a dataset of 90 million purchases from 38,744 (2008) to 45,042 (2012) U.S. households in More

Examining Barriers and Facilitators to Delivering SNAP-Education (SNAP-Ed) Programming in Rural Communities

This project will examine the barriers and facilitators to delivering SNAP-Ed programming in rural communities with a focus on policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes. The goals of this project are: 1) to identify the types of SNAP-Ed programming currently being implemented in rural communities, with a focus on PSE changes; 2) to identify barriers More

Measuring Micro-Level Effects of a New Supermarket: Do Residents Within 0.5 Mile Have Improved Dietary Behaviors?

This study aimed to examine whether a newly opened supermarket in the Bronx, NY, changed household food availability and consumption of healthy and unhealthy food items among families who lived within half a mile of the new supermarket. Participants were recruited through street intercept surveys, with a subset of respondents later completing a 24-hour dietary More

Stress in Early Life and Childhood Obesity Risk

The association between stress in early life and obesity and overweight in adulthood is well established. There is also increasing evidence of a link between stress exposure in childhood (or in utero) and child and adolescent obesity. Major sources of early life stress include adverse childhood experiences (e.g., abuse), poverty, food insecurity, and poor relationships More

Studying the Effectiveness of an Intervention to Increase Water Access and Appeal for Underserved Populations Outside School Settings

In June 2016, the Philadelphia City Council passed a 1.5 cents per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). Given the tax, the climate for promoting water and discouraging SSB consumption in Philadelphia is ideal for testing interventions that may increase water consumption. Specific aims of this study are to: l) determine the effectiveness of a More

Improved Parental Dietary Quality is Associated with Children’s Dietary Intake Through the Home Environment

This study aimed to assess the relative impact of the home food environment on children’s diet after the introduction of a new supermarket in a food desert. This study builds upon a natural experiment to longitudinally examine the food-purchasing behaviors and diets among a randomly selected population of households in two major Pittsburgh food desert More

No Fat, No Sugar, No Salt…No Problem? Prevalence of “Low-Content” Nutrient Claims and Their Associations with the Nutritional Profile of Food and Beverage Purchases in the United States

Nutrient content claims, which characterize the level of a nutrient in a food (e.g., “low-sugar”), are a commonly used marketing tactic. The association between claims, the nutritional quality of products, and consumer purchases is unknown. This study examined low-content nutrient claims on more than 80 million packaged food and beverage purchases from a transaction-level database More

Consumer Underestimation of Sodium in Fast Food Restaurant Meals: Results From a Cross-Sectional Observational Study

Restaurants are key venues for reducing sodium intake in the United States but little is known about consumer perceptions of sodium in restaurant foods. This study aimed to fill this gap by examining the accuracy of consumer estimates of sodium in restaurant meals. In 2013 and 2014, meal receipts and questionnaires were collected from adults More