{"id":26755,"date":"2025-06-27T18:53:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T13:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=26755"},"modified":"2025-06-27T18:56:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T13:11:04","slug":"new-research-explores-how-food-insecurity-affects-stress-and-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/new-research-explores-how-food-insecurity-affects-stress-and-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"New research explores how food insecurity affects stress and mental health"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Food insecurity combined with hardship does not lead to resilience,\u00a0according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 13.5% of American households experienced food insecurity at some time during 2023. That means 18 million families didn\u2019t have enough to meet their needs and often didn\u2019t know where the next meal would come from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her past research, Binghamton University, State University of New York Associate Professor\u00a0Lina Begdache<\/a>, PhD \u201908, has explored\u00a0how our diets affect our mental health and overall moods<\/a>. But how does a lack of nutrition change our resilience, stress mindset, and level of mental distress, particularly across age and gender?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\u00a0a recent paper published in\u00a0Health Science Reports<\/em><\/a>, Begdache, Assistant Professor\u00a0Melissa Zeynep Ertem<\/a>,\u00a0and their team investigated these relationships using survey data from 1,099 people, with 70% of participants under 30 years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of her overall research, Begdache\u2014a faculty member in health and wellness studies at Binghamton\u2019s\u00a0Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences<\/a>\u2014likes to compare how diet affects young adults compared to older adults, since the human brain is not done maturing until the mid- to late 20s. She admitted that some of the findings from this paper surprised her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cResilience builds off hardship, but it looks like hardship with a low quality of diet cannot build resilience. We are probably the first to report that,\u201d she said. \u201cWe also didn\u2019t find that food insecurity affects the stress mindset. People could still be happy or have a positive outlook even though they have food insecurity, so it\u2019s more related to their personality traits rather than the quality of their diet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The questionnaires also asked about participants\u2019 activity levels and factored those responses into their overall health scores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExercise is known to modulate brain chemistry, and in this research, we found that exercise was associated with improvements in neurobehaviors, including your stress mindset,\u201d Begdache said. \u201cIf you have negative thinking, you can exercise regularly and improve the way you think about stress. It improved resilience, too \u2014 specifically, resilience was highly associated with exercising.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ertem, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science<\/a>\u2019s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering<\/a>, contributed her skills in data analysis to the research. She believes it is important to assess the effects of American food policies after the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDuring COVID, there were some extra incentives where the government provided food items for vulnerable populations,\u201d Ertem said. \u201cAfter 2023, most of the extra benefits, like Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer and extra SNAP benefits have concluded. One of the big questions we want to answer was how food insecurity might affect young adults, especially after those incentives are gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Begdache thinks the new research is important for understanding how food insecurity affects psychological resilience, mental well-being, and stress-related perceptions, but it also has broader implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we take these findings and translate them into the current American diet, we\u2019re not consuming the best quality, which means that this may be affecting our resilience level,\u201d she said. \u201cThe literature has shown that the Mediterranean diet, which has a spectrum of wholesome foods, is associated with resilience. If we improve our quality of diet, we may be able to develop resilience and improve our mental health as well.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also contributing to the research were Ertem\u2019s students Amera Al-Amery, PhD \u201923 (now an assistant professor at the Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Jordan), Katerina K. Nagorny \u201924, Ushima Chowdhury \u201925, and Lexis R. Rosenberg \u201923.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 13.5% of American households experienced food insecurity at some time during 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-200x200.webp",200,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-675x506.webp",675,506,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity.webp",700,525,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-600x525.webp",600,525,true],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-600x525.webp",600,525,true],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-700x490.webp",700,490,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-550x360.webp",550,360,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-95x65.webp",95,65,true],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-640x525.webp",640,525,true],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-96x96.webp",96,96,true],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Food-insecurity-150x113.webp",150,113,true]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"Psychology<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26757,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26755\/revisions\/26757"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}