(Press-News.org) PHILADELPHIA— The recent discontinuation of pandemic-related food assistance benefits, known as the Supplemental Food Assistance Program (SNAP) Emergency Allotments, led to a substantial increase in food insufficiency in the United States, according to a new study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The primary goal of SNAP, which distributes cash-like benefits to low-income families to buy food, is to combat food insecurity, which affects 10 percent of U.S. households. The findings were published in JAMA Health Forum today.
Comparing trends in food insufficiency in states that ended Emergency Allotments before the federal government ended them altogether in March 2023 with the rest of the U.S., the researchers found that after the temporary increases to households’ SNAP benefits ended, SNAP recipients experienced a 21 percent relative increase in both food insufficiency and food insufficiency among children. These findings imply that more than two million more American households faced food insufficiency when Emergency Allotments ended in all states.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food insecurity refers to the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or the limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways. Food insufficiency is a more severe condition than food insecurity and measures whether a household generally has enough to eat.
“To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to evaluate the association between changes in SNAP benefit amounts and food insufficiency,” said Aaron Richterman, MD, MPH, an Instructor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Penn and the study’s lead author. “This study shows the severe consequences of reducing SNAP benefit amounts at a time when inflation was causing rapid rises in food prices, and is especially important because of upcoming federal negotiations surrounding SNAP’s renewal in the Farm Bill at the end of September.”
In addition to influencing chronic diseases like high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes, previous research found that mothers with school-aged children who face severe hunger are 56.2 percent more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder and 53.1 percent more likely to have severe depression. Research has found that diet-related illness increased the risk for severe symptoms and death from COVID-19, with nearly two-thirds of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. were related to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure.
Penn researchers analyzed data from more than 3 million survey respondents in the U.S. to assess the impact of losing the SNAP Emergency Allotment benefits. They focused on what happened in 18 states that discontinued the additional benefits earlier than other states in the U.S. by letting their formal public health emergency declarations expire.
“SNAP’s Emergency Allotments represented the largest-ever increases in benefit amounts for SNAP households,” added co-author Harsha Thirumurthy, PhD, a professor of Health Policy at Penn. “Our findings are particularly concerning given previous research linking food insecurity to numerous poor health outcomes. Reducing SNPA benefit amounts will have far-reaching consequences for public health.”
###
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.
.
END
WHAT:
Receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine or booster during pregnancy can benefit pregnant people and their newborn infants, according to findings recently published in Vaccine. The paper describes results from the Multisite Observational Maternal and Infant Study for COVID-19 (MOMI-VAX), which was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.
The MOMI-VAX study launched in June 2021 when data on COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant people were sparse. Researchers hoped to understand the ...
Ammonoids are a group of extinct marine mollusk animals that are now an iconic fossil group often collected by amateurs. Over 350 million years of evolution, ammonoids developed increasingly elaborate shells with fractal-like geometry. For nearly 200 years, scientists have debated the reason why these animals show a trend of increasing complexity in their shell structures. Dr. Robert Lemanis and Dr. Igor Zlotnikov from the B CUBE – Center for Molecular Bioengineering at TU Dresden created mechanical simulations of theoretical and computed tomography-based models to unveil a potential explanation: the intricate architecture of these shells may have been nature's ingenious ...
A novel catalysis scheme enables chemical reactions that were previously virtually impossible. The method developed at the University of Bonn is also environmentally friendly and does not require rare and precious metals. The researchers recorded the exact course of the catalysis in a kind of high-speed film. They did this using special lasers that can make processes visible that last only fractions of a billionth of a second. The results allow them to further optimize the catalyst. They have been published in the international edition of the renowned journal Angewandte Chemie.
Let’s say you are playing mini ...
Specific receptors in the ears of mosquitoes have been revealed to modulate their hearing, finds a new study led by researchers at UCL and University of Oldenburg. Scientists say, this discovery could help develop new insecticides and control the spread of harmful diseases, such as malaria.
The ability of male mosquitoes to hear female mosquitoes is a crucial requirement for their reproduction. As a result, the finding could help develop novel insecticides or mating disruptors to prevent mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue, and yellow fever
In the study, published in Nature Communications, ...
Over the past decade, scientists have made tremendous progress in generating quantum phenomena in mechanical systems. What seemed impossible only fifteen years ago has now become a reality, as researchers successfully create quantum states in macroscopic mechanical objects.
By coupling these mechanical oscillators to light photons - known as “optomechanical systems”-, scientists have been able to cool them down to their lowest energy level close to the quantum limit, “squeeze them” to reduce their vibrations even further, and entangle them with each other. These advancements have opened up new opportunities in quantum sensing, ...
As a crucial part of Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) technology, CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) to carbon-based fuels and chemicals presents broad application prospects in renewable energy storage and CO2 negative emission. Recently, a team led by Prof. SONG Li and Associate Researcher HE Qun from the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) put forth a novel understanding of the mechanism of CO2RR on the nickel (Ni) single-atomic sites. Their study, titled "Asymmetric ...
Researchers at The Jackson Laboratory have created a panel of genetically diverse mice that accurately model the highly variable human response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Together with collaborators at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories, the team uncovered differences in the innate immune and regulated proinflammatory responses, the timing and strength of which are associated with disease severity. Moving forward, the diverse mouse strains will allow scientists to model patient variation in COVID-19 ...
A research team led by Prof. ZHU Shu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) illustrated the role of Gasdermin D (GSDMD) protein in immunity tolerance to food in the small intestine. The study was published in Cell.
GSDMD, an executioner protein of cell pyroptosis, has garnered widespread attention. When cells are stimulated by pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), the signaling receptors within the cells activate caspase-1/4/5/8/11, leading to the N-terminal cleavage of GSDMD and ...
A team led by Prof. LIU Guilin and Prof. HE Zhicheng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) discovered superbubble pairs generated by quasar-driven outflows of three red quasars for the first time. This study was published in Science Advances.
The observed number of massive galaxies is significantly lower than the prediction of the current galaxy evolution theory, thus certain mechanism is needed to suppress star formation and modulate the growth of the galaxy. To bridge the gap between theory and observation, an outflow mechanism where a galaxy nucleus drives a massive amount of gas into intergalactic ...
Prof. REN Baohua and his team from the School of Earth and Space Sciences, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), uncovered the connection between Arctic daily warming and the equator region as well as Atlantic storms. The series of studies have been published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, Environmental Research Letters, and Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
As one of the coldest places where the average winter temperature is -30℃, the Arctic temperature has reached the melting point several times, for instance, in late December 2015 and 2022. Those Artic daily warming events ...
