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a b s t r a c tSome have suggested that the US food stamp program (FSP) should be revised with a view to combating obesity among the poor. In this paper, we assess the likely impacts of allowing FSP participants to purchase only healthy foods when using food stamps. Our results indicate that FSP participants would probably increase their consumption of healthy food, but the implications for their purchases of unhealthy food are not clear. Market-wide consequences are even less clear, because changing what may be purchased using food stamps would lead to higher prices for healthy foods and lower prices for unhealthy foods and these price effects would feed back into consumer decisions, with adverse effects on consumption patterns of both participants and non-participants in the FSP. In addition, more restrictive rules on the use of food stamps would discourage participation in the FSP. We conclude that, while reforming the FSP may indeed to lead to better diets among participants, it is likely to be an ineffective and inefficient instrument for bringing about desired nutritional outcomes unless accompanied by additional policy instruments. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
IntroductionLinks between poverty, policy, and nutritional outcomes are complex. For example, the growing numbers of people who are categorized as obese and overweight are drawn from all socioeconomic, ethnic, and demographic groups, but not uniformly. Several writers have observed that low-income women-including those receiving food stamps-are more likely than the rich to be obese and overweight (Gibson, 2003;Townsend et al., 2001). This observation leads to two questions. First, has the current food stamp program (FSP) contributed to growing obesity among the poor in the United States? Second, could the FSP be redesigned such that it would contribute towards improving diet quality and ultimately reducing obesity?The first of these questions is a question for careful model-driven statistical analysis of the historical data. Several studies in recent years have yielded a range of results, but the overall message from the published work is that, compared with non-participants, FSP participants tend to spend more on food, and more on food away from home, and are more like to be overweight or obese. Details differ among studies regarding the size of these effects among different demographic groups-in particular between male and female participants. 1 This paper explores the second question, which has not been subject to as much study though various...