Recent study suggests a key reason parents on a low-income buy unhealthy foods for his or her families is to compensate for non-food related activities which support social wellbeing, but that they’re unable to afford.

The study from the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London sheds light on the food buying habits of low-income parents across England. It checked out how these families’ food practices could also be influenced by their ‘food environment’, i.e. where people can purchase and eat food outside of the house, in addition to promoting and promotions they arrive across, but in addition the broader socioeconomic aspects of their lives that could be affecting their decision making.

The findings support the well-established view that a food environment where unhealthy foods are ubiquitous, low cost and heavily marketed, drives parents to feed their families on them. Nonetheless, they further suggest that when parents are unable to afford social activities with their children, like visiting a ‘soft play’ centre or holidays even a brief distance away, they’re moreover driven to compensate with family ‘treats’ taking the shape of unhealthy food routines.

Examples of such routines identified within the study include family visits to fast-food outlets just like the local ‘chippy’ (fish and chips shop), kebab shop, or (famously branded) burger restaurant, and even food related events at home corresponding to family snacks time in front of a movie or board game.

The study involved 60 parents on low incomes as participants, recruited equally from deprived neighbourhoods across three regions of England: Great Yarmouth, Stoke-on-Trent and the London Borough of Lewisham. Participants were aged over 18, a parent of a baby at school of nursey and the first shopper within the family. Reflecting the highly gendered nature of food work, 56 participants were women.

All participants took part in semi-structured interviews referring to practices of buying, preparing and consuming foods within the family, and the roles of various members of the family, including children, in enacting those practices. Fifty-eight of the participants took part in a photograph elicitation exercise over every week where they took photos of things that made it harder or easier for them to purchase the food they wanted for his or her families. Twenty-two of the participants also took part in a ‘shop-along’ interview where they guided the interviewing researcher across the shops of their alternative, and what they bought.

The information from these sources were coded in a ‘thematic evaluation’ to discover key themes which informed the interpretation of the findings, summarised overall as:

• low-income families use many tools to navigate food environments and feed families inside budget.
• food environments push families to unhealthy foods but support other elements of wellbeing.
• food practices shape how families engage with food environments.
• Food environment interventions must also address the broader elements of individuals’s lives

Based on the findings, the study authors’ policy recommendations include removing unhealthy food promotions and food service outlets from the food environment, whilst crucially replacing them with healthier promotions and outlets to retain the opportunities for social wellbeing these provide for families.

Further recommendations include increasing the variety of inexpensive, family activities available in deprived, local communities; making existing activities more cost-effective, corresponding to through the provision of discounts; and addressing the broader social have to lift families out of economic insecurity, corresponding to through more extensive profit schemes, living wage policies, and motion on insecure work provision.

Given the wonderful food available on this country, it is a travesty how many individuals’s health is broken by poor quality diets. This study shows that the pathway forward involves understanding how people experience food of their on a regular basis realities. Policy to handle inequalities will only work if it recognises that food is greater than just nutrition and must meet a wider range of individuals’s needs, corresponding to social and economic well-being.

Professor Corinna Hawkes, Principal Investigator of the Study, and Director of the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London

The study is published online within the journal, Health & Place.

The authors undertook this study as a part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Obesity Policy Research Unit that conducts independent research to tell government policy.

Source:

Journal reference:

Isaacs, A., et al. (2022) From healthy food environments to healthy wellbeing environments: Policy insights from a focused ethnography with low-income parents’ in England. Health & Place. doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102862.