Aquaculture America 2024

February 18 - 21, 2024

San Antonio, Texas

PROMOTING HEALTHIER DIETS: ANALYZING THE EFFECTS OF SEAFOOD INCLUSION IN THE WIC PROGRAM

Roberto Cárdenas-Retamal *; Di Fang ; Frank Asche

 Food and Resources Economics Department, and Food Systems Institute, University of Florida, USA.  Email: robertocardenasr@ufl.edu

 



Seafood contributes considerably to healthy diets and has been increasingly recognized for its contribution to global food security and nutrition. Besides their nutritional contribution, 90% of Americans do not consume the recommended amounts of seafood. In light of that, the 2020 dietary guidelines for Americans recommended that the U.S. population for all ages consume more seafood . This recommendation is accompanied by a policy design that added  canned seafood to food packages for the Women, Infants, and Children’s Supplemental Nutrition (WIC) program, which serves to safeguard the health of low-income pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding women, infants, and children up to age five who are at nutritional risk by providing nutritious foods to supplement diets . This article’s first objective is to estimate the effect of  belonging to the WIC program on seafood purchases . To do this, we used HomeScan Nielsen Consumer panel data for the U.S. , which provides information on households’ food purchases, demographics, and self-reported WIC participation status. Our results on the effect of WIC participation on seafood purchases indicate that eligible people using the program increase their seafood purchases by about 22%.  Our second objective is to analyze how the policy of adding seafood to the WIC program influences their seafood purchase trends. Given the previous results , we expected that  canned seafood purchases would increase in the targeted group.  Although making dietary changes is difficult because habits are highly persistent, our results are in line with the literature in two contributions. The first is that updates to the WIC program have reflected increased purchases of the target products, which is in line with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans . The second implication is that focusing efforts on small changes can deliver better results toward the transition to a healthier diet for vulnerable groups .