Food Bank–Based Diabetes Prevention Intervention to Address Food Security, Dietary Intake, and Physical Activity in a Food-Insecure Cohort at High Risk for Diabetes

Abstract

What is already known on this topic? Food insecurity is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, and household food insecurity is more prevalent where a household member has diabetes. What is added by this report? Food bank clients at risk for diabetes were offered a year-long diabetes prevention pilot intervention near Oakland, California. The intervention featured diabetes-appropriate food, text-based education, and health care referrals. At midpoint (6 months), we found significant improvements in food security, dietary intake, physical activity, and health status. Twelve-month results were unchanged from midpoint. What are the implications for public health practice? Food banks, which serve highly vulnerable communities, can improve food security and nutrition, but further reducing chronic disease risk and improving health outcomes may require additional partnerships.

Hunger and Health: Taking a Formative Approach to Build a Health Intervention Focused on Nutrition and Physical Activity Needs as Perceived by Stakeholders

“…Medical interventions are surfacing and have shown promise in food pantry settings [ 44 ]. Within the pantry setting, disease specific interventions (e.g., diabetes management interventions) have shown success among pantry clients [ 22 , 45 ]. However, disease specific interventions leave an unmet gap in serving pantry clinics with co-morbidities outside of the scope of that intervention.…”

Testing the effectiveness of physical activity advice delivered via text messaging vs. human phone advisors in a Latino population: The On The Move randomized controlled trial design and methods

“…The two SMS interventions were developed in collaboration with CareMessage, a not-for-profit organization that builds mobile health solutions for underserved populations [35][36][37][38]. Their patented, text message-based coaching technology enables providers to interact with patients/users through automated messages.…”

Strategies to support healthy food choices for adults living with low socioeconomic status and type 2 diabetes mellitus: an integrative literature review

“…A review of the titles and abstracts produced 24 articles for a full text review, with the above inclusion and exclusion criteria applied, resulting in 13 articles to be included in the integrative review. Among the 13 articles, there was one systematic review/meta analysis study design (Afshin et al, 2017), one qualitative study design (Berkowitz et al, 2020), and 11 quantitative studies that included cohort and quasi experimental designs (Afshin et al, 2017;Anekwe & Rahkovsky, 2014;Berkowitz et al, 2019Berkowitz et al, , 2020Cavanagh et al, 2016;Cheyne et al, 2020;Cohen et al, 2017a;Mayer et al, 2016;Palar et al, 2017;Seligman et al, 2015;Weinstein et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2017). Varied methodologies have been included to provide a broad lens of the literature.…”

“…Three knowledge categories of food intervention were used for this integrative literature review. The first food intervention category was understood as healthy food being made directly available to a population through food delivery/distribution (Berkowitz et al, 2019(Berkowitz et al, , 2020Cheyne et al, 2020;Palar et al, 2017;Seligman et al, 2015). The second category was understood as a food intervention that is indirect, achieved through the increased density of grocery stores (Zhang et al, 2017) or increased variety of food available in stores .…”

“…Two projects in partnership with food banks, targeting populations with T2DM to receive food that met the recommendations for a diabetic diet over the course of six or 12 months, were of particular interest (Cheyne et al, 2020;Seligman et al, 2015). Not only did these projects address food needs, directly, but they also provided education and management support for people living with T2DM, and discussed further in the section of this chapter highlighting nutrition education as a standard of care (Cheyne et al, 2020;Seligman et al, 2015). The benefit of food delivery or distribution is that it can address multiple access dimensions at once, breaking down barriers of availability, accessibility, affordability, and acceptability.…”