Background: Policy initiatives have provided funding for non-acute nutrition interventions to address food insecurity as a social determinant of health, but more research is needed to understand the outcomes of these initiatives in order to determine the areas of highest impact. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the outcomes that were assessed in three nutrition interventions (produce prescription programs, medically tailored meals, and community supported agriculture) that aim to address food insecurity as a social determinant of health, and this was undertaken in order to identify future areas of study that can heighten impact.
Methods: This systematic review was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) criteria. A list of search terms and keywords were compiled by the research team. A Boolean search was conducted from 1 January 2000 to 1 January 2023 in the PubMed advanced search database.
Results: A total of 1015 articles were initially pulled from the PubMed database, and, after a screening process, 21 articles were included in our review. Nineteen of the articles focused on adult populations or families and two focused on children. The main outcomes assessed were changes in self-reported dietary intake, while a few of the articles addressed feasibility and cost-related outcomes.
Conclusions: More research is needed to assess whether nutritional interventions to address food insecurity as a social determinant of health are feasible and more cost effective in the long term. Additionally, more work should be conducted in pediatric populations, which could have a robust return on investment in terms of both healthcare utilization and healthcare expenditure.
Keywords: community-supported agriculture; food insecurity; medically tailored meals; produce prescriptions; social determinants of health.