A study published in Pediatrics reveals that including more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat milk in the food voucher package provided by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s (USDA) Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) may improve diet quality for the roughly 4 million children who are served by the program.
The researchers analyzed the diets of 1,197 children, aged 2–4, from low-income households before and after the 2009 change in the food package. The researchers used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to compare a nationally representative sample from 2003 to 2008 with diets in 2011 to 2012. The researchers calculated the Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2010), which is a score with 100 possible points measuring adherence to dietary guidelines, from two recalls by parents of their children’s diets over the previous 24-hr period.
The researchers found that for children in households using WIC, the HEI-2010 score increased from 52.4 to 58.3 after the policy change. After adjusting for characteristics in the sample and trends in the comparison group, the researchers showed that there was an increase of 3.7 points that was attributable to the WIC package change.
Using the HEI-2010, the researchers calculated the “greens and beans” score, which counts dark green vegetables and includes any legumes, such as beans and peas that were not already counted as protein foods on a different score. After the WIC food package was changed, the “greens and beans” score increased for children in WIC but not for their counterparts. Roughly half of the children in WIC households had eaten some vegetables, whereas only one in five non-WIC children had consumed any green vegetables at all in the two days their parents were surveyed.
Lead author June Tester, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, noted that the results of this study will be useful to the Institute of Medicine committee that is reviewing and assessing the nutritional status and food needs of the WIC-eligible population and the impact of the 2009 revision to WIC food packages. The committee will make recommendations for changing the food packages.
