How Healthy Is Hunger Relief Food?

Abstract

Distributing healthy food is an important goal for hunger relief agencies, but they face many challenges in meeting it. Budgets for purchasing food are limited, and hunger relief agencies often have little influence over the nutritional quality of food they receive through donations. In a recent study, Healthy Eating Index (HEI) scores were calculated monthly using electronic invoice data for food shelves served by two major food banks in Minnesota. While the HEI is directly related to nutrition guidelines and provides great detail in its scoring, implementation requires careful measurement and classification of foods and a rather complex set of calculations. In addition, a significant portion of food distributed by food banks is mixed pallets of free “miscellaneous” that cannot readily be included in HEI calculations. We propose and test a less data‐ and labor‐intensive measure for characterizing the healthfulness of food distributed by hunger relief agencies. This new measure, the Hunger Relief Nutrition Index (HRNI), facilitates nutritional assessment of miscellaneous foods, allows for easy aggregation of healthfulness scores across food sources and time periods, and correlates well with the HEI.

Refining and implementing the Food Assortment Scoring Tool (FAST) in food pantries

“…Building on the work of King et al (2016) demonstrating that a nutrition index based on gross product weight could serve as a useful instrument for monitoring nutritional quality in the hunger relief setting, 10 this study refined a 13-category FAST index with input from six food pantry representatives and two food banks. Implementation of the FAST in a diverse set of 5 pantries was feasible (i.e., foods were sorted, weighted, and recorded by food pantry staff and volunteers for 5 consecutive days), and the measure correlated well with HEI-2010 scores at different stages of food distribution.…”

“…Functioning with scarce resources, pantries have few opportunities to overhaul their existing practices. 10…”

“…For instance, acquiring a proprietary tool like NuVal 13 would likely be too expensive, and limits in staff capacity make it difficult to implement a complex scoring system aligned with U.S. Dietary Guidelines. 10,1413…”

“…To address these limitations, King et al (2016) designed and tested an alternative nutritional quality index for the hunger relief system. 10 Their goal was to develop an index that (i) is easier to implement than the HEI-2010, (ii) can be used across the hunger relief system to track food from different sources over time, (iii) is transparent to users, and (iv) correlates well with the HEI-2010. 10 The Hunger Relief Nutrition Index (HRNI) is defined by the expression: HRNI=∑h=112∑i=1nβhiGWSi…”

Application of the Healthy Eating Index-2010 to the hunger relief system

“…In one study, personnel from twenty food banks voiced concern with tools that require extensive nutrition expertise and recommended a system that all food banks can use to evaluate their inventories was needed ( 27 ) . Responding to these limitations, a modified approach is currently under development by the study team and described elsewhere ( 37 ) . The Hunger Relief Nutrition Index (HRNI) has the potential to be administered at the local agency level at the point of purchase and correlates well with the HEI-2010 ( 37 ) .…”