When Clare Lenhart, Ph.D., associate professor of public health at East Stroudsburg University, sat down with graduate assistant Ivan Mendoza, of Sheffield Village, Ohio, to crunch the numbers from a needs assessment of community food pantries, they found some scary statistics.<\/p>\n
About 65 percent of the pantry clients surveyed had at least one of four diet-related chronic illnesses: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease or obesity. Almost 10 percent had all four.<\/p>\n
They also found that only about a third of the food given out at local food banks are considered \u201cfoods to encourage\u201d by health standards.<\/p>\n
Those revelations could help the Pocono Mountain Hunger Coalition find funding to enable area food pantries to offer healthier food to their low-income clients.<\/p>\n
So says Jennifer Strauch, who directed the Pleasant Valley Ecumenical Network food pantry for 2\u00bd years and sits on the Hunger Coalition Steering Committee.<\/p>\n
\u201cData drives funding,\u201d says Strauch, who is now grants manager for Monroe County. \u201cThat\u2019s why it was so important for me to work with Dr. Lenhart and her public health students. If we can show that there\u2019s a need, we can target programs that are effective and efficient and we can hopefully increase the amount of funding that is coming into our community to address the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Providing healthier food for those who visit the food pantries can save communities money in the long run by cutting down on health care costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can prevent a low-income diabetic patient from entering the ER because our food pantry system is doing a better job providing healthier food for longer periods of time\u2026it\u2019s a win-win,\u201d Strauch says.<\/p>\n
Strauch, who has a master\u2019s degree in public health from ESU, says the university has been key to the Hunger Coalition work, providing research, resources, student volunteers and interns. That includes a previous graduate assistant, Sydney Huerbin, who was instrumental in working with Lenhart to launch the research project and graduated with her master\u2019s in public health last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are a big part of the Hunger Coalition\u2019s success to date,\u201d Strauch says. \u201cWe could not have done it without them.\u201d<\/p>\n
ESU graduate students surveyed about 200 food pantry clients on their health, including diet-related illnesses, and also asked them what they would like to see more of, such as nutrition education and demonstrations on healthy cooking. Those students, led by Mendoza, also surveyed food pantry directors in Monroe and Pike counties to find their challenges in helping clients.<\/p>\n
Six Monroe and seven Pike food pantries get most of their supplies from the Second Harvest Food Bank of Lehigh Valley and Northeast Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of the food pantries up here are small and they don\u2019t have a lot of refrigerator or freezer space,\u201d Lenhart says. \u201cSo even if they got surplus produce from Second Harvest, they wouldn\u2019t necessarily be able to store it until it was time to distribute it.\u201d<\/p>\n
But even with such limitations, making small changes to food donations, such as providing peaches canned in juice instead of syrup, can help clients with dietary-related diseases, Lenhart says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there is considerable opportunity to improve food quality in our pantry system locally,\u201d Lenhart says. \u201cThere are a lot of opportunities to use the pantries as a service-oriented site because we now know the recipients have significant health needs. Setting up diabetes screenings or blood pressure checks, and providing health conscious meal options in those settings, would be really appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the strong economy, food pantries are seeing an increase in need, in part because of inflation, Strauch says. The SNAP program, formally known as food stamps, has not kept up with rising prices.<\/p>\n
At a meeting of food pantry directors in late March, Mendoza presented the results of the ESU assessment and included examples of what pantries around the nation do to help clients.<\/p>\n
Mendoza, who is a wrestler, says he has seen first-hand how eating healthy improves his performance on the mat but also in the classroom. He\u2019s working toward his master\u2019s degree in public health because he wants to empower people to make healthier lifestyle decisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more I practice it, the more I preach it, the more I want to study it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In researching the best practices of food pantries around the country, he was able to make recommendations that make sense for rural areas where transportation can be an obstacle for low-income people.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething that can be done in New York City cannot necessarily be done in Monroe and Pike counties,\u201d Mendoza says.<\/p>\n
Lenhart said Mendoza did a great job on the presentation, inspiring pantry directors to take notes on his findings even after a long day of meetings.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s very motivated,\u201d Lenhart says. \u201cHe really takes initiative. He\u2019s able to take guidance, then run with it and get it done and bring back a product very efficiently.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Clare Lenhart, Ph.D., associate professor of public health at ESU, sat down with graduate assistant Ivan Mendoza, of Sheffield Village, Ohio, to crunch the numbers from a needs assessment of community food pantries, they found some scary statistics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":18600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[143,20,202,27,220],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-esu-success-stories","category-graduate","category-health-sciences","category-points-of-pride-academic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18601,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18588\/revisions\/18601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/backup_insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}