PULLMAN, Wash. - American Indians and Alaska Natives living below the poverty line face sharply higher rates of food insecurity than other impoverished adults - nearly 4 in 10 lack consistent access to a healthy diet.
Meanwhile, the poorest Asian American adults have some of the highest food security rates at 90%, which is more than even those with higher incomes.
These are among the findings of new research by Washington State University sociologist Justin Denney, which demonstrate that food insecurity - defined as the lack of consistent access to food for an active, healthy lifestyle - is a complex and varied problem across racial and ethnic groups. It suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach may be ill-suited to addressing the problem.
"Food security is really powerfully related to health, and there are some pretty severe health disparities by racial and ethnic groups," said Denney, the William Julius Wilson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology. "By better understanding the state of food security across those racial and ethnic groups, we might get a little closer to understanding where some of these health disparities come from and what to do about them."
The new paper was published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Denney performed a cross-sectional analysis of the responses of 37,748 adults to the National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, from 2019 to 2023.
He estimated the proportions and probabilities of food security for non-Hispanic White, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian and Hispanic adults living in three low-income categories: severe poverty (defined as below 50% of the federal poverty line), moderate poverty (between 50% and 100% of the poverty line) and near poverty (100% to 200% of the line).
The federal poverty line for 2026 is $15,960 in gross earnings for a single adult, and $33,000 for a family of four.
One consistent characteristic across categories was the fact that, despite the persistence of food insecurity for a significant number of people, most poor Americans are food secure, Denney said. More than 80% of all low-income adults considered themselves food secure, and nearly three-quarters of those in severe poverty did so.
"At any given time, most poor households, counterintuitively, are food secure," he said. "The reason I wrote this article was we don't know exactly what that looks like across different racial and ethnic groups, though we know that's an important factor for food security. What I found is there's a lot of nuance."
Across the sample from severe poverty to near poverty, White and Hispanic respondents had similar levels of food security, at 82.5% and 81.3%, respectively. Asian respondents had significantly higher food security (87.3%), while it was lower among Black (74.9%) and American Indian/Alaska Native (70.2%) respondents.
These patterns were generally consistent across the categories of poverty, with a few exceptions. A significantly lower percentage of AIANs in severe poverty reported food security (62.1%), and a significantly higher percentage of Asian adults in severe poverty reported food security (90.1%).
Among the potential reasons for the disparities are differences among groups in using the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It's also likely that community connections and neighborhood food resources play an important role in the differences.
To make food assistance programs as effective as possible, policymakers should work to understand the differences and what is driving them, Denney said.
"We need to go into different communities and try and understand what the strategies are, what works and what doesn't, and use that to try and make sure that people can feed their families," he said.
