Does Food Benefit Program, WIC Offer Healthy Cereal Options in NY?
A healthy start of the day begins with breakfast, at least in my opinion. With that being said, cereal is one of the most common and popular breakfast options. They range in many different flavors, shapes, sizes, as well as nutritional facts. Cereal also functions as a cold or hot food item which is why many consumers find it easy to purchase and stock up on, especially during this pandemic.
WIC, short for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children is a federal assistance program to help support “low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five”, living in the United States, according to their website. This program offers federal grants to those who qualify and with it, they can buy food products from groceries to help with all necessary items, including cereal.
Due to our current global situation of the Coronavirus known as Covid-19, it has caused a shortage of food, or to be more precise, causing empty shelves in grocery stores throughout the states. Within days of a quarantine lockdown beginning, people rushed to the grocery stores and other convenience stores to stock up on food and supplies which make trying to find available products, especially when someone is a WIC recipient can be very hard to find. When shopping for food, many people do not realize that certain food products are labeled for WIC. The news channel, WAAY-TV 31 News reported how local recipients of the program in North Alabama, was directly affected by the pandemic:
This issue brought the curiosity of trying to understand whether the participation of WIC has risen since people need to supply food in order to stay at home. According to USDA, data shows that in January 2020 there were approximately 6,147,061 total participants in the US States and Territories as of April 10, 2020, an increase of 1.1% from last year in December. New York reporting 356,746 participants this year. This may or may not have been a direct result of Covid-19 but it can help us find a solution on which cereal brands are available to buy using WIC and if they are healthy options while stocking up.
When I spoke to the manager of a C-Town Supermarket in Queens about which cereal brands do food benefit programs let customers buy, the manager explained that with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), you can get any type of cereal. SNAP is similar yet different to WIC in the case where it is offered to all low-income families not just for women, infants, and children. WIC, however, has limited options to which cereals are eligible to purchase.
Approved WIC cereals vary from state to state, including what the cereal has to have in order to be purchased. For New York, cereal must be 12-ounce boxes or larger and you can’t buy organic cereal or boxes with single-serving packets according to the NYS WIC Foods Guide. This food guide even provides tips on how to mix match and buy 36 ounces of cereal:
The list of all the (cold) cereals available to purchase by WIC in New York is as follows:
Whilst doing the research for the cereal options available to WIC participants, I came across another data set that showed all the nutritional values of 80 different cereal brands. Eliminating the hot cereals, I calculated which manufacture produces healthier cereal in terms of how much calories, protein, fiber, and sugar, the cereals intake. These are the results:
Based on these results, it looks like although General Mills and Kellogs are high on the calories, and sugar scale, they are still doing good on the protein and fiber intake while Nabisco, Post, Quaker Oats, and Ralston Purina are balanced from all four values.
I also used this dataset as inspiration to compare the cold cereals that WIC offers in New York and eventually come up with the solution to my question: Does WIC offer healthy cereal options? Here is a data visualization along with data of the healthiest cereal in accordance with how high the calories are in it from left to right, top to bottom:
In conclusion, WIC does offer healthy cereal options in NY since it carries lots of good nutrients such as protein Iron, B Vitamins, etc., according to the NYS WIC Foods Guide. The question that now stands is whether the WIC will change or add more cereal options since many of these brands are becoming less available due to the pandemic.
