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Improving access to healthy, affordable foods can help prevent and reduce obesity among children and families. Yet many families do not have access to healthy affordable foods in their neighborhoods and communities. Food access is also an important component of food security, which is having consistent access to enough nutritious food for a healthy active life. In 2018, an estimated 1 in 9 Americans were food insecure, including more than 11 million children.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, this number rose to the highest levels ever documented in the U.S. at 38%, with nearly 1 in 2 households with children impacted. Research in this area focuses on increasing access to healthy affordable foods through grocery stores, corner stores, restaurants, mobile food vendors, farmers’ markets, and other food outlets in low-access areas including lower-income communities in urban and rural areas.
Research & Publications See all
September 2025
Food Insecurity-Related Stigma Among Adults in the United States: A Scoping Review
This review aimed to characterize individual- and structural-level stigma associated with government (ie, SNAP, WIC) and emergency food program (ie, food banks, pantries, cupboards, soup kitchens) utilization in the US. 5 databases (PubMed, PsychINFO, Web of Science, CINAHL, Sociological Abstracts) were searched in June 2024. The review included peer-reviewed articles (January 2004 – June 2024), More
August 2025
Resources to Improve Implementation of the Healthy Eating Research (HER) Nutrition Guidelines for the Charitable Food System
This guide contains training materials, resources, tips, and examples of practices to help food banks improve the implementation of Healthy Eating Research (HER) Nutrition Guidelines for the Charitable Food System. To create this guide, the research team interviewed people working in food banks across the country to learn how they approach ranking foods using the More
August 2025
Diet Quality and Weight Status are Predicted by Federal Nutrition Assistance Program Participation, Health, and Demographics
This study investigated whether demographic, social, and economic determinants of health, including length of time participating in safety net programs, are associated with diet quality and weight status in early childhood. Using the WIC infant and toddler feeding practices study-2, classification and regression tree identified the sequence of binary splits that best differentiated the sample More
July 2025
State Earned Income Tax Credit and Food Security: Results Among Economically At-Risk Households With Children
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the state Earned Income Tax Credit on food insecurity among economically at-risk U.S. households with children and explore differential effects across sociodemographic groups. The authors used an intent-to-treat causal inference design and household-level data from all 50 U.S. states available from the Current Population More