Earlier this month, the Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Tom Vilsack proposed changes to the national school lunch program “to reflect the latest nutrition science.” Included in the announcement was the acknowledgment that: “by law, [the] USDA is required to set standards for the foods and beverages served through the school meal programs, including nutrition standards that align with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans [DGAs].”

The USDA proposed limiting the amount of added sugars in school meals to reflect the link between added sugars and the public health crisis of childhood obesity. While the USDA is making the right call, it raises the question – why not do the same for other government programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamp Program)?

SNAP provides more than five times as much federal assistance to low-income households than school meals – $113 billion vs. $16 billion in 2022. Like the school lunch program, a stated goal of SNAP is “to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s population by raising levels of nutrition among low-income households.” Unlike the school lunch program, however, SNAP has no nutrition standards.

Moreover, the USDA uses a tool called the Thrifty Food Plan to set SNAP benefit levels, where USDA researchers construct a “market basket of food” to reflect the cost of purchasing a healthful diet on a limited budget. While SNAP benefits reflect the cost of a nutritious diet, there is no requirement that recipients use SNAP dollars to purchase healthy foods. Households can use SNAP benefits to purchase any food or beverage, with the exception of alcohol.     

The result is that actual SNAP purchases fall well short of the nutrition guidance provided in the Thrifty Food Plan. For example, the 2021 Thrifty Food Plan assumed a diet (for adult men) where “miscellaneous” items, including pre-prepared foods and sweetened beverages, accounted for 8.5 percent of the food budget. In reality, SNAP households spend almost 25 percent of their food budgets on sweetened beverages, frozen prepared foods, and prepared desserts alone, according to a 2016 USDA report– items that nutrition experts recommend limiting.

The idea of nutritional standards or restrictions in SNAP understandably makes some people uncomfortable. After all, low-income families, just like the rest of Americans, should have the autonomy to purchase the foods that they want. But the federal government’s largest nutrition assistance program does not need to subsidize unhealthy diets. There is disconnect when the law establishes SNAP benefit levels to afford a healthful diet, but there is no requirement that households purchase products to fulfill that diet.

Skeptics argue that SNAP benefits are fungible, meaning they are interchangeable with cash, making SNAP restrictions or nutritional standards meaningless. But research shows that SNAP benefits are not perfectly fungible. Consistent with past research, a 2019 study found that “the marginal propensity to consume food (MPCF) out of SNAP benefits is significantly higher than the MPCF out of cash-on-hand.” In other words, households spent more on food when they received an increase in SNAP compared to an equivalent increase in cash, suggesting that benefits distort food-purchasing behaviors. The study authors attributed this finding to mental accounting, where “people treat income in the form of an in-kind transfer differently than they than they would in the form of cash.”

Questions remain over whether nutritional standards in SNAP, like those in the school lunch program, could effectively improve nutrition and reduce diet-related disease. The health consequences of doing nothing, however, warrants exploring the possibility. A recent article by Jerold Mande and Grace Flaherty of Harvard School of Public Health provide a useful description of the problem and SNAP’s potential role:

“Children participating in SNAP were more likely to have elevated disease risk and consume more sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), more high-fat dairy, and more processed meats than income-eligible nonparticipants. However, research suggests that federal food assistance programs with more stringent nutrition standards – the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP) – improve dietary quality, increase birth weight and gestation periods, and reduce childhood obesity, infant mortality and healthcare costs.”

The USDA wants to improve the health of students by improving the quality of school lunches. It is time Congress does the same with SNAP and considers how nutritional standards can improve the diet quality of low-income households.

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