Delivering Health: An Integrated Approach to Address Diabetes in the Context of Food Insecurity

Background and Rationale

Decades of increasing incidence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) present a multifaceted challenge to the health of a growing number of Americans, affecting their diets and how they live life. Approximately 30 million (~9%) of all people in the US have T2D, and this number is expected to continue to rise. At the same time, 15 million (11.8%) US households experience food insecurity, which is associated with risk for T2D and other chronic diseases. Both T2D and food insecurity are even more prevalent in Arkansas, with rates of T2D and food insecurity at 12.2% and 17.3%, respectively.

Approximately 46 million Americans per year turn to food pantries and related programs to help meet household nutritional needs. However, food pantries are not a long-term solution to improve health for food insecure people with T2D. Most food pantries do not provide food of sufficient dietary quality to support a healthy lifestyle.

Diabetes self-management education (DSME) is an approach with documented efficacy in helping people manage T2D. DSME supports informed decision-making, encourages goal setting and problem solving, and improves self-care behaviors. Recent studies have shown promise for DSME among food pantry clients with T2D. However, studies have suffered from problems with attendance and retention.

We designed a study to develop and evaluate the efficacy of a plain-language DSME curriculum to improve the nutritional health, physical activity, and health outcomes of low-income food insecure people with T2D. We home-delivered this curriculum along with T2D-appropriate healthy food boxes to mitigate difficulties associated with access to healthy food and attendance at DSME sessions outside of the home. We hypothesized that this approach will lead to improvements in participants' glycemic control, diet quality, and other outcomes.