New research explores how food insecurity affects stress and mental health

(Press-News.org) According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 13.5% of American households experienced food insecurity at some time during 2023. That means 18 million families didn’t have enough to meet their needs and often didn’t know where the next meal would come from.

In her past research, Binghamton University, State University of New York Associate Professor Lina Begdache, PhD ’08, has explored how our diets affect our mental health and overall moods. But how does a lack of nutrition change our resilience, stress mindset and level of mental distress, particularly across age and gender?

In a recent paper published in Health Science Reports, Begdache, Assistant Professor Melissa Zeynep Ertem and their team investigated these relationships using survey data from 1,099 people, with 70% of participants under 30 years old.

As part of her overall research, Begdache — a faculty member in health and wellness studies at Binghamton’s Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences — likes to compare how diet affects young adults compared to older adults, since the human brain is not done maturing until the mid- to late 20s. She admitted that some of the findings from this paper surprised her.

“Resilience builds off hardship, but it looks like hardship with low quality of diet cannot build resilience. We are probably the first to report that,” she said. “We also didn’t find that food insecurity affects the stress mindset. People could still be happy or have a positive thinking even though they have food insecurity, so it’s more related to their personality traits rather than the quality of their diet.”

The questionnaires also asked about participants’ activity levels and factored those responses into their overall health scores.

“Exercise is known to modulate brain chemistry, and in this research, we found that exercise was associated with improvements in neurobehaviors, including your stress mindset,” Begdache said. “If you have negative thinking, you can exercise regularly and improve the way you think about stress. It improved resilience, too — specifically, resilience was highly associated with exercising.”

Ertem, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, contributed her skills in data analysis to the research. She believes it is important to assess the effects of American food policies after the pandemic.

“During COVID, there were some extra incentives where government provided food items for vulnerable populations,” Ertem said. “After 2023, most of the extra benefits like Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer and extra SNAP benefits have concluded. One of the big question we want to answer was how food insecurity might affect young adults, especially after those incentives are gone.

Begdache thinks the new research is important for understanding how food insecurity affects psychological resilience, mental well-being and stress-related perceptions, but it also has broader implications.

“If we take these findings and translate them into the current American diet, we’re not consuming the best quality, which means that this may be affecting our resilience level,” she said. “The literature has shown that the Mediterranean diet, which has a spectrum of wholesome food, is associated with resilience. If we improve our quality of diet, we may be able to develop resilience and improve our mental health as well.” 

Also contributing to the research were Ertem’s students Amera Al-Amery, PhD ’23 (now an assistant professor at the Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Jordan), Katerina K. Nagorny ’24, Ushima Chowdhury ’25 and Lexis R. Rosenberg ’23.

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