Essays on Assessing the Impact of WIC Food Package Revisions on Participants’ Food Selection and Consumption and Infant Feeding Practices

Healthy food choices and consumption during early childhood are important for growth and development and forming healthy eating habits, which could significantly impact individuals’ long-term health outcomes. However, millions of children in the United States are still facing the problem of food insufficiency. Children from low-income households can be especially vulnerable to this problem. Food assistance programs play an important role in providing low-income households with access to nutritious foods and educational resources and help participants make healthy food choices within their budget. For this reason, understanding the effect of food assistance programs on participants’ food choices and consumption can provide more insights to help improve the effectiveness of assistance programs and provide better support to people in need. In this dissertation, we examine the impact of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food packages revisions and the effect of maternal nutrition knowledge on their feeding practices of infants, toddlers, and pre-school age children for WIC participating households. The first study uses the mixed-effect regressions and the Texas Food and Nutrition Questionnaire (TEXFAN) data to examine how mothers’ nutrition knowledge affects mothers’ and children’s consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grain and refined grain products, and milk. Results show that better nutrition knowledge of daily food could significantly increase the WIC participants’ likelihood to have healthier dietary patterns. In the second and third studies, we use data from the National Food and Nutrition Survey for WIC (NATFAN) to investigate the effects of the revised WIC food packages on mothers’ breastfeeding practices and time of introducing complementary foods. Findings reveal that the mothers are more likely to breastfeed their infants after the revisions in WIC and delay introducing complementary foods to infants. However, the level of improvement in participants’ breastfeeding practices varies by poverty regions. Overall, the results suggest that enhancing mothers’ nutritional knowledge and revising the assistance policies to meet program participants’ needs may shift the food consumption of mothers, infants, and children to healthier patterns