American Diets Have A Long Way To Go To Achieve Health Equity – Where The Food Comes From
When the analysis focused on key subgroups, the researchers found that these improvements were not universal. Gains in dietary quality were highest among younger adults, women, Hispanic adults, and people with higher levels of education, income, food security, and access to private health insurance. They were lower among older adults, men, Black adults, and people with lower education, less income, food insecurity, or non-private health insurance. For example, the proportion of adults with poor diet quality decreased from 51.8% to 47.3% among individuals with lower income, decreased from 50.0% to 43.0% among individuals with middle income, and decreased from 45.7% to 29.9% among individuals with higher income.
“While some improvement, especially lower consumption of added sugar and fruit drinks, is encouraging to see, we still have a long way to go, especially for people from marginalized communities and backgrounds,” adds first author Junxiu Liu, a postdoctoral scholar at the Friedman School at the time of the study, now assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“We face a national nutrition crisis, with continuing climbing rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes,” Mozaffarian said. “These diseases afflict all Americans, but especially those who are socioeconomically and geographically vulnerable. We must address nutrition security and other social determinants of health including housing, transportation, fair wages, and structural racism to address the human and economic costs of poor diets.”
Citation: This research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute under award R01HL115189. Complete information on authors, methodology, funders, and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper.
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