ALBANY, Ga. \u2014 Belinda McLoyd has been thinking about peanut butter. McLoyd, 64, receives a small monthly payment through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps. \u201cThey don\u2019t give you that much to work with,\u201d she said. To fit her tight budget, she eats ramen noodles \u2014 high on sodium and low on nutrition \u2014 multiple times a week.<\/p>\n
If she had more money, said McLoyd, who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and heart problems, she\u2019d buy more grapes, melons, chuck roast, ground turkey, cabbage, and turnip greens. That\u2019s what she did when lawmakers nearly doubled her SNAP benefit during the pandemic. But now that a GOP-led Congress has approved $186 billion in cuts to the food assistance program through 2034, McLoyd, who worked in retail until she retired in 2016, isn\u2019t sure how she will be able to eat any healthy food if her benefits get reduced again. McLoyd said her only hope for healthy eating might be to resort to peanut butter, which she heard \u201chas everything\u201d in it.<\/p>\n
The second Trump administration has said that healthy eating is a priority. It released a \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d report citing poor diet as a cause of childhood illnesses and chronic diseases. And it\u2019s allowing states \u2014 including Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah \u2014 to limit purchases of unhealthy food with federal SNAP benefits for the first time in the history of the century-old anti-hunger program. President Donald Trump also signed a tax and spending law on July 4 that will shift costs to states and make it harder for people to qualify for SNAP by expanding existing work requirements.<\/p>\n
Researchers say SNAP cuts run counter to efforts to help people prevent chronic illness through healthy food. \u201cPeople are going to have to rely on cheaper food, which we know is more likely to be processed, less healthy,\u201d said Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. \u201cIt\u2019s, \u2018Oh, we care about health \u2014 but for the rich people,\u2019\u201d she said. About 47 million people lived in households with limited or uncertain access to food in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n
Belinda McLoyd and other residents in Georgia\u2019s Dougherty County, where Albany is located, already face steep barriers to accessing healthy food, from tight budgets and high rates of poverty to a lack of grocery stores and transportation, said Tiffany Terrell, who founded A Better Way Grocers in 2017 to bring fresh food to people who can\u2019t travel to a grocery store. More than a third of residents receive SNAP benefits in the rural, majority-Black county that W.E.B. Du Bois described as \u201cthe heart of the Black Belt\u201d and a place \u201cof curiously mingled hope and pain,\u201d where people struggled to get ahead in a land of former cotton plantations, in his 1903 book, \u201cThe Souls of Black Folk.\u201d<\/p>\n
Terrell said that a healthier diet could mitigate many of the illnesses she sees in her community. In 2017, she replaced school bus seats with shelves stocked with fruits, vegetables, meats, and eggs and drove her mobile grocery store around to senior communities, public housing developments, and rural areas. But cuts to food assistance will devastate the region, setting back efforts to help residents boost their diet with fruits, vegetables, and other nutritious food and tackle chronic disease, she said. Terrell saw how SNAP recipients like McLoyd ate healthier when food assistance rose during the pandemic.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration said it\u2019s boosting healthy eating for low-income Americans through restrictions on what they can buy with SNAP benefits. It has begun approving state requests to limit the purchase of soda and candy with SNAP benefits. However, research shows that programs encouraging SNAP recipients to buy healthy food are more effective than regulating what they can buy. Such limits increase stigma on families that receive benefits, are burdensome to retailers, and often difficult to implement, researchers say.<\/p>\n
The cuts to SNAP benefits pose a significant challenge to the goal of promoting a healthier national diet. With millions of Americans already struggling to access nutritious food, reducing their benefits will only exacerbate the problem. It is crucial to find alternative solutions that support low-income families in making healthy food choices without resorting to restrictive measures that may do more harm than good.<\/p>\n
Introduction to the Issue ALBANY, Ga. \u2014 Belinda McLoyd has been thinking about peanut butter. McLoyd, 64, receives a small monthly payment through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps. \u201cThey don\u2019t give you that much to work with,\u201d she said. To fit her tight budget, she eats ramen noodles \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-wellness"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/www.sun-sentinel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/202507240400MCT_____PHOTO____US-NEWS-HEALTH-FOOD-BENEFITS-CUTS-2-KHN.jpg?w=1024&h=682&w=1024&resize=1024,682&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17992,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17990\/revisions\/17992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citystuff.com\/miami\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}