Fruits of Knowledge: Causal Effects of Household Adult Food Insecurity on Coincident Dysfunctional Impulsivity

Abstract

With the magnitude of and recent rise in people living in food-insecure U.S. households, the impacts of food insecurity on individuals’ socioeconomic outcomes are of crucial interest. While food insecurity’s deleterious relationship with individuals’ health-related quality of life, including mental health symptoms, has been thoroughly studied, the effects of food insecurity on welfare through its influence upon cognitive skills are less explored. Given empirical evidence of the adverse association between dysfunctional impulsivity and quality of life, this paper therefore uses data from The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study to explore the relationship between food insecurity and coincident dysfunctional impulsivity in a larger sample of U.S. male and female adults in a less idiosyncratic environment than prior studies. With two measures for dysfunctional impulsivity and four measures for household food insecurity across four different regression models, OLS, logit, negative binomial, and fixed effects, this analysis provides marked and robust evidence that household adult food insecurity has an unfavorable causal effect on contemporaneous dysfunctional impulsivity; results are more emphatic and consistent among mothers, likely due to the smaller regression samples available for fathers. Among mothers and especially fathers, detriments to overall physical and mental health, including depression, from food insecurity are persistently observed to mediate this relationship importantly. This evidence can encourage the development of policy solutions to improve individuals’ decision-making and welfare, including both targeting the root of the issue by ameliorating nationwide food insecurity, and directly limiting exacerbations of dysfunctional impulsivity through therapeutic approaches. Future research would ideally consider a larger, more nationally representative sample over longer time periods with a broader variety of measures for dysfunctional impulsivity, including both self-reported questions and standard delay discounting tasks.