America’s food program for the poor should focus on nutrition

SNAP, the program previously called food stamps, has been instrumental in reducing hunger in America. Building on that success, SNAP must also focus on nutrition — after all, it’s called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for a reason.  

Poor diet is the leading risk factor for mortality in the U.S. Moreover, six in 10 adults have at least one chronic condition, many of which are nutrition related, including heart disease, some cancers, stroke or diabetes.

Poor diet drives up health care costs across the nation. In fact, it accounts for almost 20 percent ($50 billion) of annual U.S. health care costs from heart disease, diabetes and stroke, according to a federally funded study. Diet-related disease affects all Americans, including SNAP recipients. With that in mind, federal policymakers need to ensure that SNAP focuses more attention and resources on the diet quality of recipients, making their nutrition and health a higher program priority, similar to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and the National School Lunch Program.

Policymakers have a golden opportunity to do so this year when the White House and Congress work to reauthorize SNAP as part of a new five-year Farm Bill, which lawmakers plan to craft in the coming weeks.

Some 41 million Americans — about 12 percent of the population — participate in SNAP each month. Nearly half are children, two-thirds are in households with children and over a third are in households with older adults or nonelderly adults with disabilities. Improving the nutritional quality of SNAP-funded meals not only would improve the health of SNAP recipients, but it also would put Washington more firmly behind better nutrition and health in America. 

As part of a Bipartisan Policy Center task force, which we co-chaired in 2018, we proposed eliminating sugar-sweetened beverages from the list of items that can be purchased with SNAP benefits given the potential health benefits and cost-savings to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. Research has shown that combining incentives for healthy food and disincentives for unhealthy food has the potential to generate the greatest health benefits and health care cost savings. 

A recent Morning Consult poll conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that nearly six in 10 SNAP participants, Republicans and Democrats equally and by a 2:1 margin, support a combined approach of additional benefits for the purchase of healthful items along with a reduction in benefits if unhealthy foods are purchased.  

Nutrition has already become a higher priority for most food assistance programs. Food banks are increasingly serving fresh produce and ensuring that canned and processed foods are low in sodium and added sugars. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has made nutrition security a key objective in all USDA-administered programs, especially school meals.

To make nutrition a more central focus of SNAP, policymakers should take at least the following four steps.

To start, they should make diet quality a core, statutory focus of SNAP. Legislation from Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — the SNAP Nutrition Security Act of 2023 — would not only provide a statutory focus on nutrition within SNAP but craft a robust data collection strategy to identify opportunities to improve nutrition in the program.

Policymakers should also improve the Gus Schumacher Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP), which provides competitive grants to programs that encourage good nutrition through incentives to low-income consumers to buy fruits and vegetables, and prescriptions from health care providers to direct patients to eat more fruits and vegetables. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed support for the program, and they should consider boosting GusNIP funding and reducing matching fund requirements for grantees as they consider improvements moving forward.

While not in the current policy proposals, Congress should empower and encourage states to create multiple, rigorous demonstration projects in SNAP to evaluate different innovative approaches to reduce hunger and improve nutrition at the same time.

Finally, they should strengthen the SNAP Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Grant Program, which provides nutrition education to low-income households, better integrating it with other federal and state nutrition and obesity prevention programs so that it reaches more people and has a more positive effect.

Poor diet leads to all-too-many cases of premature death and disability and to higher health care costs. SNAP can help reverse those trends by empowering its tens of millions of participants to buy and eat more nutritious meals.

Dan Glickman and Ann M. Veneman, who served as secretary of agriculture under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush respectively, also are co-chairs of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force.