The FETCH Project is a NIH-funded study, motivated by understanding the role of food insecurity—or lack of economic access to healthy and preferred food—as a key socioeconomic stressor that impacts tobacco use and cigarette smoking. The overall project goals are to identify, document, and understand how the experience of food insecurity is associated with cigarette smoking behaviors and smoking cessation, both at the population level and at the community level. At the population level, we leverage large datasets to examine population-level trends and patterns in how food insecurity, smoking, and smoking cessation intersect. At the community level, we aim to better understand how the experience of food insecurity poses barriers to quitting, and to apply the findings towards testing feasible strategies to promote the use of evidence-based cessation resources among smokers experiencing food insecurity in the Greater Cleveland community.

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Research findings show that food insecurity and smoking are often highly clustered, and that food insecurity is a barrier to smoking cessation. The Food Security for Successful Smoking Cessation, or Food for SucCess, is a NIH-funded pilot intervention study to address food insecurity and smoking in tandem, towards increasing the potential to reduce socioeconomic health disparities related to either health risk. This work is conducted at the Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods, with partnership of the Institute for H.O.P.E. at the MetroHealth System in Cleveland, Ohio.

Photo credit: West Side Market by Lance Anderson; Free to use under Unsplash License