SNAP Benefits Exacerbate Obesity and Diet-Related Disease: Can Something Be Done?

The debt ceiling fight wages on in Congress. One of the items that is part of this fight is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more colloquially known as food stamps. Part of what the Republican Party is negotiating is to raise the work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWD) from 50 to 56. This reform would potentially affect over 1 million Americans currently receiving SNAP benefits. 

The people over at USA Today make it seem like a callous move by the Republicans. As I explained last month, this reform is a step in the right direction. It is needed to maintain the long-term sovereignty of the program. These new work requirements would improve employment rates, as well as the well-being of unemployed ABAWD individuals on SNAP benefits. That being said, the issues with SNAP go beyond budgetary or labor market issues. 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), "SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food and move towards self-sufficiency." You would think that with "nutrition assistance" in the title, SNAP would actually deliver nutritious options to those who need it. Much like with the Inflation Reduction Act or the Affordable Care Act, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program fails to live up to its name.  

Earlier this month, the center-Right American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a report entitled Promoting Mobility Through SNAP: Toward Better Health and Employment Outcomes. AEI took a look at data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). One of the main findings of this report is that SNAP recipients have poorer health outcomes than non-recipients. The first shocking aspect is that SNAP recipients are more likely to have diet-related diseases. 

What is just as concerning is that SNAP recipients across all age categories are more likely to be obese than non-recipients, regardless of income bracket (AEI, p. 12). 

This finding lines up with a 2018 USDA report on the nutritional quality of food purchased by Americans. As we see from this report, SNAP recipients are more likely to purchase empty calories and refined grains. SNAP recipients are also less likely to purchase fruits, vegetables, protein, and whole grains. 

A 2016 USDA study similarly shows that 23 percent of SNAP benefits were spent on sweetened drinks, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar. In other words, the U.S. government uses SNAP to spend $25 billion a year subsidizing junk food. The 2016 study found that soft drinks was the single largest commodity purchased under SNAP (USDA, 2016, p. 5). 

One has to ask why there is a correlation between SNAP benefits and poorer health outcomes. Advocates posit it is because SNAP recipients do not have nearby access to healthy food, that they live in food deserts. The USDA begs to differ: "Further, on all of our measures of nutritional quality, SNAP-participating households with low household-level access to food stores did not differ from SNAP-participating households with better access (USDA, 2018, p. 15)."  

Price of healthy food does not seem to be the culprit, either: "Contrary to conventional wisdom, research shows that when measured properly (per nutrient or per serving, for example), healthy foods actually cost less than unhealthy foods (AEI, p. 15)." You cannot blame American culture or poverty on these disparities because SNAP participants have worse health outcomes than low-income non-participants. Many who advocate for greater SNAP benefits would like to ignore that cost or access to healthier options are not the issue with SNAP, so what is?

While it is easier to identify what is not the cause of the health disparities, figuring out what is turns out to be a more difficult task. Part of these poor health outcomes comes from the fact that SNAP program has no nutrition standards whatsoever (AEI, p. 1). It still does not explain why SNAP recipients have worse health outcomes, even worse so than low-income individuals who do not receive SNAP benefits. Subsidies act as an economic incentive, that much is true. In this case, SNAP benefits are subsidizing a disproportionate amount of unhealthy eating and exacerbate public health outcomes, including the obesity epidemic. Do SNAP benefits incentivize poor health decisions or is this a demographic that happens to make more unwise decisions when it comes to their health?

Whether SNAP benefits are explicitly causing poor health or not, what remains clear is this: after years of food stamps and having increased funding for SNAP spending, nutrition and health outcomes for SNAP recipients remains poor. The question is whether anything could be done to reform SNAP.  I detailed in 2013 how we could reform the SNAP program. 

Conceptually, it would be nice to have nutrition requirements on SNAP benefits to help SNAP recipients have better health outcomes. Either banning the purchase of soda or having a certain percentage of benefits allotted towards fruits and vegetables comes to mind. I would even be for a limited Fruits and Vegetables program instead of no nutrition requirements. That alternative would cost only about $20 billion instead of $127 billion allotted for SNAP benefits in FY 2023. 

Much like with Social Security, I wonder if it would be simpler to scrap SNAP instead. The government getting the food pyramid wrong is an example of why the government does not have the best track record in telling people how they should eat. We cannot even get Congress to pass something as minimal as stricter work requirements after Biden did away with them in 2021. Plus, the Secretary of the USDA recently commented that nutrition requirements are not an option because they would stigmatize the obese. The intransigence in Congress gives me little hope that SNAP would be eliminated. Government gets spending regardless of whether a program works, and once established, it is hard to eliminate a government program. 

At the same time, I hope that private charities can step in while Congress gets its act together. Private food-related charities are at least incentivized to be more efficient with spending and fund programs that succeed. Regardless of the outcome in Congress, it does not change the fact the SNAP benefits do a poor job at promoting nutrition for its recipients.