When someone is diagnosed with a chronic illness such as diabetes or heart disease, one of the recommendations is to often change what they eat.

Changing what they add to their grocery cart will be a critical part of managing their health, but purchasing habits, food prices and other economic factors can make those changes easier for some families while complicated for others.

A University of Florida (UF) research team has secured a $525,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) to study how a chronic disease diagnosis impacts household food purchasing decisions and for what reasons.

The project, “Understanding Dietary Change and Food Purchase for Better Policy Design,” comes at a time when the concept of “food is medicine” has gained momentum. The movement aims to recognize and leverage the role nutrition can play in preventing and managing chronic diseases. The research also aligns with the UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) Food is Medicine initiative, which explores the connections between food, nutrition and health.

“A chronic disease diagnosis often comes with advice about what people should eat but knowing what to eat and being able to afford and sustain those changes are two different things,” said Di Fang, an associate professor at the UF/IFAS Food and Resource Economics Department. “Our research will help us understand what families actually do after a diagnosis, how long those changes last, and how food prices influence their ability to make healthier choices.”

Rather than looking only at whether people know what they should eat, the project will examine the economic realities that can shape whether households are able to put that knowledge into practice.

“That information can help us design nutrition policies and programs that make healthy eating more realistic and sustainable for families managing chronic diseases,” she said.

The study will measure the nutritional quality of household food purchases and examine whether changes following a diagnosis are temporary or continue over time.

The researchers will analyze national data sets from the USDA Consumer Food Data System, which includes information from Circana’s Consumer Network that tracks grocery purchases and other consumer buying behaviors over time. The same data sets track grocery purchases among more than 120,000 U.S. households and combine that information with health and prescription medication data from participating households, helping researchers examine how food-buying habits change after a chronic disease diagnosis.

Using data that follows the same households over time, researchers will compare food purchases before and after a chronic disease diagnosis to determine whether the nutritional quality of those purchases change.

The project will also look at how food prices influence purchasing decisions. Understanding whether households alter their purchasing in response to the prices of healthier foods could provide information about how nutrition programs and policies are designed.

“Research shows that for most consumers, price is of key importance when choosing what to buy, and this is more so for families with lower incomes as well as larger families where their income has to stretch further,” said Frank Asche, a distinguished professor in natural resource economics at the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences. “However, a healthy diet need not be expensive as nutritional attributes often do not impact the product price. As such, dietary advice can be more effective if accounting also for cost.”

Fang and Asche hope the findings will provide evidence that can help policymakers and program administrators develop more effective approaches to supporting healthy eating.

Featured Adobe stock photo located in banner is a close-up of a shopping cart in supermarket. Adobe photo credit by Jenwit.