(Press-News.org) BUFFALO, N.Y. -- For many people, the need to go grocery shopping is met with a sigh, or an "ugh." It's generally not considered to be an enjoyable experience.
For moms who shop using WIC benefits, it can be a downright awful experience, one that's often made worse by difficulty finding eligible products and dealing with a lengthy checkout process. Add kids in tow and it's enough for many moms to forego re-enrolling in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly known as WIC.
But researchers at the University at Buffalo are working on ways to improve the WIC shopping experience so that customers stay in the program. Moreover, they're working with a Western New York-based supermarket chain on a pilot project aimed at making it easier for WIC customers to find and use eligible products.
The team, which includes a researcher from North Carolina State University, recently published a study in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition that is among the first to examine both barriers to and possible strategies for WIC shopping.
WIC provides supplemental foods and nutrition education to low-income pregnant and postpartum women with infants and children up to age 5 whose household incomes are below state-defined thresholds.
While WIC has been proven to improve children's health, participation in the program isn't great, with some reports indicating that as few as 73% of infants, 38% of children and 67% of pregnant and postpartum women eligible for WIC actually participate.
"The restrictions on the foods that families can buy with WIC make the shopping experience difficult, but there are some things that stores can do to make it easier, such as using product placement and signage. Better staff training helps a lot, too," says Lucia Leone, PhD, the study's lead author.
"Poor shopping experiences can lead people to drop off WIC or not re-enroll because they feel like the time and frustration isn't worth it. This leaves them without a benefit that we know improves children's health," adds Leone, an assistant professor of community health and health behavior in UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions.
WIC barriers
Researchers identified several key barriers to shopping with WIC. In addition to restrictions on eligible foods, another common challenge is identifying the correct product size (11 oz. vs. 14 oz., for example) and type (low sodium vs. regular). New York State now has an app to help identify which items are eligible, but it doesn't let you know where to find them in a specific store.
Until recently, further confusion often ensued during checkout, which was challenging when the cashier wasn't well trained, a common occurrence given the frequent turnover among grocery store staff. The checkout experience has improved, Leone notes, with the implementation of electronic benefits transfer (EBT) for WIC, which occurred after this study took place. The WIC EBT system replaced the paper vouchers shoppers used previously.
Then there's the obstacle of product availability, an issue that was exacerbated over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which retailers struggled to keep certain products in stock due to high demand.
WIC doesn't allow replacement products, so if a shopper can't find a 12 oz. box or larger of a plain cereal during her first shopping trip, she will then have to make a special trip, possibly visiting multiple stores.
In addition, WIC benefits can't be redeemed online. "This meant that parents had to choose between bringing small children to the store during a pandemic or not fulfilling their benefits," Leone says.
"Aside from the shopping issues, some families struggle to use all of the products if they are not items their family eats regularly," she adds.
There's also the issue of stigma, as many WIC shoppers express worry about how other customers perceive them.
Strategies for an improved experience
For this study, researchers in 2015 conducted eight focus groups involving 63 women in Erie and Niagara counties in Western New York. Participants described some of the challenges associated with WIC, and also talked about what worked well.
One such strategy is "shelf-talkers," or special signs that denote WIC eligible products, making them easier to find. The signs help reduce search time and alleviate confusion at checkout. New York State regulations, however, don't allow most stores to use shelf-talkers. Nor can retailers offer WIC-only sections.
Of course, well-trained grocery store staff, especially cashiers and store managers, also improve a shopping trip by cutting down on the amount of time spent cashing out.
Additional strategies mentioned included having a WIC product guide available in store and allowing WIC shoppers to use self-checkout.
Partnering with Tops to improve WIC shopping experience
There is currently no research available on the role of retailer interventions to improve WIC redemption and/or retention rates.
That's why Leone and her team are piloting a project with Tops Markets on Niagara Street in Buffalo.
"The goal of this project is to make it easier to use WIC products by sharing recipes made with mostly WIC products," Leone says. "More importantly, all those items will be 'bundled' together in the store so that families can quickly go in and find all of the WIC items they need for the recipe in one place rather than searching around the store."
Customers won't have to purchase all the products, but, Leone notes, they tend to purchase bundled items because of perceived convenience. Non-WIC families can take advantage of these kid-friendly meal deals, too. Some items in the recipe bundle will also be on sale.
The bundled items are not sold in a package together, but are instead tied together by a recipe and located together in the store to make shopping for WIC products more convenient.
INFORMATION:
Co-authors on the paper include Lindsey Haynes-Maslow, PhD, assistant professor of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University; Christina Kasprzak, doctoral student in community health and health behavior in UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions; Samina Raja, PhD, professor of urban and regional planning in UB's School of Architecture and Planning; and Leonard H. Epstein, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor in pediatrics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Fibroid symptoms, such as heavy menstrual bleeding and abdominal pain, are increasingly driving women to the emergency room.
In fact, tens of thousands of women were seen annually in the emergency department for the condition, which involves benign growths in the uterus, over a 12-year period.
But only 1 in 10 of these visits led to a hospital admission, suggesting that many cases may have been managed in an alternative, non-urgent health setting, according to recent Michigan Medicine research.
"Fibroids are often a chronic disease, so we have opportunities to treat this through established care with a trusted health provider. Yet, we've seen a big increase in women using the emergency room ...
While the term "supergene" may bring to mind the genetic hocus-pocus of Peter Parker's transformation into Spiderman, supergenes are actually fairly common phenomena in the realm of biology. A supergene refers to a genomic region containing multiple genes or genetic elements that are tightly linked, allowing genetic variants across the region to be co-inherited. Supergenes may arise when there is a clear benefit to inheriting specific combinations of biological traits together. Perhaps the most well-known examples of supergenes are sex chromosomes, which allow traits that are beneficial to the reproductive success of one sex to be co-inherited. In humans, this ...
(Boston)--Only a small subset of people who get a lung infection go on to become very sick yet who will become severely ill or why is unclear. This is now widely recognized in the context of COVID-19, where most people have mild or no illness while others with the same infection become extremely sick or even die.
Researchers now have discovered that after recovering from a respiratory infection, new cells get deposited in lung tissue, persist there and then become antibody secreting cells very quickly if the lungs later get re-infected by something similar.
"It is increasingly clear that our lungs contain their own specialized immune system, different from the immune system throughout the rest of the body," explained corresponding ...
In some environments there is no way for a seed to know for sure when the best time to germinate is.
In spring, cues like light, temperature and water may suggest to seeds that conditions are optimal for germination, but a week later an unpredictable drought or frost could kill the emerging seedlings.
So how does a plant make sure that all of its offspring are not killed at once by an ill-timed environmental stress following germination?
There is evidence that some plant species produce seeds that germinate at different times to hedge their bets against this risk. Many species produce seeds that can enter a dormant state and exist in the soil for several years and some also produce seeds that germinate at different ...
Research by scientists from University of Southampton (UK) and the Central University of Jharkhand (India) and has shown the first COVID-19 lockdown in India led to an improvement in air quality and a reduction in land surface temperature in major urban areas across the country.
The study found that travel and work restrictions imposed early in the pandemic resulted in a significant environmental improvement, due to an abrupt reduction in industrial activities and a major decrease in the use of land and air transport.
The international team used data from a range of Earth Observation sensors, including those from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5p and NASA's MODIS sensors, to measure changes in surface temperature and atmospheric ...
Efforts to contain the novel coronavirus have caused lockdowns and school closures around the world. These efforts and policies have unfortunately cut off many children from valuable resources such as the opportunity for exercise, access to clean water and food, learning, and socialization. Therefore, the effects on mental health and behavior may be found not just in adults but children. However, studies published thus far have been limited to elucidating the mood of middle school and high school students and the conditions for which mood problems occur ...
Drinking straws are single use plastic products which will be subjected to a Europe-wide sales ban from 2021 onwards. This is stated in EU Directive 2019/904 from 5 June 2019. Consequently, alternative materials have to be established for the production of drinking straws as well as other frequently used products which predominantly were made of plastic so far.
As set out in the EU Framework Regulation for food contact material (Regulation (EC) No. 1935/2004), objects that come into direct contact with food must be safe. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has appraised straw, silicone, metal, paper and paper-board, durum wheat, and glass for their suitability to replace plastic ...
Using a brain-training app helps people eat less junk food and lose weight, new research suggests.
The Food Trainer (FoodT app) trains people to tap on images of healthy foods - but to stop when they see unhealthy snacks, creating an association between these foods and stopping.
The new study, by the universities of Exeter and Helsinki, found that playing the game about once a day for a month led to an average one-point reduction of junk food consumption on an eight-point scale (the scale ranges from four or more items per day, to one or zero items per month).
Overall, people who used the app more also ...
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder caused by the death of dopaminergic neurons in a part of the brain (known as substantia nigra pars compacta), which leads to a deficit of dopamine (DA), one of the main neurotransmitters active in the central nervous system. Symptomatic treatment focuses on increasing the concentration of dopamine into the brain.
However, dopamine is not directly administered, because it is unable to cross the so called blood-brain barrier, which prevents some of the substances circulating in the blood to penetrate into the nervous system. Thus, DA precursor levodopa (L-DOPA) -an amino-acid which participates ...
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Craig S. Carlson and Michiel Postema, from University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and Tampere University, Tampere, Finland discuss deep impact of superficial skin inking: acoustic analysis of underlying tissue.
Skin tattoos are a common decoration, but profound scientific study on whether a skin tattoo alters the acoustic response from superficial tissues, and therefore from underlying tissue, was previously lacking; thus, any quantitative effects were unknown.
This study is the first to investigate the nature of artifacts in ultrasound images, which have been observed to originate from tattooed skin. The work was conducted theoretically and experimentally using ...
