Dean discusses connections between poverty, malnutrition in urban, rural RI

04/10/09 - The University of Rhode Island Women's Studies Program sponsored a lecture last night about the connections between poverty and poor health, and how they affect Rhode Island.Nancy Fey-Yenson, the associate dean of URI's College of Human Science and Services and professor of nutrition and food sciences, spoke to a crowd of more than 70 people about the subject. She said her lecture focused on women in particular because, statistically, women are the primary caretakers of both young and old people, and therefore more often deal with decisions of food purchases.

"In hard economic times, [illness] and mortality are disproportionately female," she said. "In other countries, food is given to sons and not to daughters primarily because sons work. In the U.S., it is a bit more insidious."

Fey-Yenson has been at URI for more than a decade, and during that time has been published numerous times. She also has garnered millions of dollars in research grants for the university.

Because of social pressures in America, including constant advertising, social acceptability of certain food outlets and a system she called the "food stamp cycle," it is increasingly difficult for women to find healthy and nutritious food at an affordable price, she said.

"You go into your living room and watch T.V., as far from the kitchen as possible, and you are bombarded with food advertisements telling you to eat," she said.

The food-stamp cycle is a system in which people receive food stamps and overeat during the first weeks of the month after obtaining them. Then, they eat less during the following weeks. She said because of pressures from their children and constant bombardment of advertisements, women, especially those who use food stamps, buy more expensive and less nutritious food. Combined with other social and cultural factors, this leads to women sacrificing their own food for their family members.

These cycles of feast and famine, as she put it, also cause the body to store and save more fat than usual because of the lack of consistent food intake. She said this is much like the hunter-gatherer metabolism people had in prehistoric times. This in turn leads to obesity and malnutrition among both women and children.

"Thirty-seven million people live below the poverty line [in the United States]," she said. "Seventy-five percent of them are women and children."

According to Fey-Yenson, in the past few years, Providence and Hartford, CT, have been neck and neck for the cities in the United States with the highest rate of child malnutrition. She said this is somewhat due to the assumption that collecting food stamps and obtaining groceries at food banks is socially unacceptable. For example, she said that almost half of the people who qualify for food stamps in Rhode Island alone do not collect them, for fear of being labeled as poor.

"Everyone just wants to look normal," she said.

Fey-Yenson said this is because of a cultural reality she called "food deserts." She said that because of lack of accessible transportation, both in rural and urban areas, there "deserts," which make it nearly impossible for some families to get access to affordable and healthy food.

In Rhode Island alone, she said, access to affordable healthy food, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, is extremely limited in urban areas. In rural areas of the state, public transportation makes it nearly impossible for families below the poverty line to get to shops with affordable and nutritious foods. Even with public transportation, she said, getting groceries is still a challenge.

"Many women know what it's like to get groceries with their kids in tow," she said. "Now imagine that while having to take the bus. It's nearly impossible.