

While charity organizations have long sought to provide food aid to those in need, the increasing number of people seeking this assistance requires alternatives. People seeking asylum in high-income countries are vulnerable to food insecurity due to limited opportunities for social and economic participation.

Results can inform intervention efforts to make available healthy options appealing and easy to select while also improving the customer experience in food pantries. One pantry adopted an agency-specific nutrition policy and 12 adopted a coalition-level policy. Pantry directors reported valuing the intervention approach and implemented six of nine behavioral economics strategies, especially those targeting the visibility and convenience of foods, along with layout changes and expanded customer choice.

More than half of food items in 11 categories met sodium standards for foods to be chosen “often”. We conducted sodium assessments of food at 13 food pantries, tracked implementation of intervention strategies, and interviewed 10 pantry directors. This study assesses the sodium content of pantry foods and lessons learned from an adaptable intervention to support pantries in adopting policies and environmental changes to make healthy, lower-sodium foods appealing and accessible. Pantry customers often experience difficulty acquiring healthy foods, however little is known about pantry foods’ sodium content specifically. Sodium consumption is a modifiable risk factor for hypertension, so pantry customers would benefit from access to low-sodium foods. In the United States, food pantries increasingly serve as regular food sources for low income households experiencing high rates of chronic disease, including hypertension. This narrative review is the first to explicitly focus on asylum seekers in high-income countries with CNCD, excluding mental health conditions, and to explore initiatives, programmes and policies that enhance health promotion to facilitate self-care in this populace. CNCDs represent high burden of disease in asylum seekers but have a low priority in reported research. There is little research on self-care and health promotion in adult asylum seekers with CNCD.
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Eleven studies fitting the inclusion criteria were assessed against the study objectives.įree access to health-care services and pharmaceutical products, free access to food banks and supermarket model food banks, English and cooking lessons, community integration training sessions and culturally competent health-care workers were found to promote health and self-care. Studies inclusive of other migrant groups such as undocumented migrants and those with mental health conditions were excluded. Included articles focussed on policies, programmes or initiatives with the potential to promote health in adult asylum seekers residing in high-income countries. Narrative review of literature conducted by searching EMBASE, CINAHL, WEB OF SCIENCE and PSYCINFO databases for articles published from 2010 to 2021. This paper aims to identify health-care entitlements that exist for asylum seekers with chronic non-communicable disease (CNCD) that promote their health and self-care, and to explore health policies, initiatives and programmes with the potential to foster self-care in this populace. In addition to donor guidelines that highlight the need for nutritionally and culturally appropriate foods, further supplementary nutritional education may be required to encourage healthy food choices where they exist. Providing choice around food acquisition is one way to promote dignity in the refugee determination process however, this may not be the best way to provide a nutritionally adequate diet. This may be due the structure of the foodbank, the nature of relying on community donations of food and complexities surrounding healthy food choice among asylum seekers. Despite the foodbank allowing clients to individually select the food they wish to consume, the food baskets remained nutritionally inadequate. Baskets were found to have higher than recommended levels of sodium and fat.

Analysis revealed that an average basket was deficient in almost all micronutrients including vitamins A, C, D and E, folate, calcium and zinc. The food baskets of 116 asylum seekers, all over the age of 18, who were wholly reliant on the foodbank were analysed for nutritional content. A structured process of direct observation was used to document each item selected from the foodbank in a single basket. The aim of this research was to investigate whether a foodbank working directly with people seeking asylum and incorporating client choice, located in Melbourne Australia, can meet the nutritional requirements of asylum seekers.
