Effect of Food Stamp Program on Nutrient Intake

1
Effect of Food Stamp Program on Nutrient Intake

• Xiaowen Liu
• Department of Agricultural Economics

2
Outline

• Introduction
• Methodology
• Data
• Result
• Conclusion

3
Introduction

• Food Stamp Program (FSP)
• History 1939-now
• Objectives of FSP
  to help low-income households obtain
  adequate and nutritious diets by providing
  electronic debit cards that can be redeemed for
  food with few restrictions

4
Name change
5
Is it helpful?

• Food Intake
• Increase in meats, added sugars, and total
  fats
• Increase in total food expenditure.
• Nutrient Intake
• FSP effects on nutrient intake are
  negligible
• Negative effect
• Positive but non-significant effect.

6
Objectives

• Identify the factors that determine participation
  by eligible individuals in the FSP
• Determine the effectiveness of the FSP in
  increasing nutritional intake of its participants
• Determine the effects of socio-demographic
  factors on nutrient intakes by SNAP eligible
  individuals.

7
Methodology

• Simple Regression
• FSP 0 (participants)
• 1 (non-participants)
• Nutrient
• 
  Exogenous

8

• Treatment Effect Model (dFSP)

9

• Switching Regression Model
• System Regression
• Statistical efficiency

10

• Program Treatment Effect
• Participants
  Non-participants

11
Data

• National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
  (NHANES) 2003-2006
• Eligibility Define (lt130 poverty level)
• Five nutrients
• Protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Calcium and
  Iron
• Explanatory Variables
• Income, race, age, marital status
• Worry running out of food, self-access health
  etc.

12
Results

• Program Participation
• Income (), country of origin (-), marital status
  (-), being African-American (), presence of
  children (), being a female (), household
  ownership (), and household size (-), etc.
• Self-access health is good (-).
• Nutrient Intake
• Income (), country of origin (), college
  education (), presence of children (-), smoke
  (-), age (-), dietary supplement (), etc.

13

• Average Treatment Effect
• Male Female
  Pooled
• Protein 488.413 245.762
  355.318
• Vitamin C -33.549 3.673
  -13.132
• Vitamin A 854.137 482.212
  650.134
• Calcium 155.228 79.218
  113.536
• Iron 195.669 68.511
  125.922

14
Conclusion

• Food Stamp Program has been improved in several
  ways
• Use of EBT card
• Nutrition Education
• Data Improvement
• Previous dietary recall
• Now blood and urine examination

15
Conclusion

• Nutrition education
• Policy change on food restriction
• for example EBT card can be used to buy
  dietary supplement.
• Data collection methods
• more psychological questions (stigma)
• for example will you feel uncomfortable
  using EBT card when checking out?