Does Place Matter? Dietary Change Among Immigrants to the US

Abstract

ObjectivesOn average, U.S. immigrants experience increases in body mass during their time in the country. These changes are related to important shifts in diet post immigration but could also continue to be influenced by sending-area environments. We assess the level of variance in dietary change that is attributable to country of origin and U.S. state of residence-level factors. MethodsUsing longitudinal data on three measures of dietary change from the nationally-representative New Immigrant Survey (n = 7930), we use cross-classified multilevel models to test what proportion of the variance in dietary change is attributable to country of origin vs. U.S. state of residence. The three measures of dietary change are degree of change (1–10); whether any foods from the home country were abandoned; whether any new foods were adopted in the U.S. ResultsWhen foreign-born individuals received legal permanent resident status (+/– 8 years after arriving in the U.S.), country of origin explained 6% of individual variation in diet (a moderate but nontrivial amount), with state of residence explaining a much smaller amount of variance at 1.6%. Interesting, the interaction of country of origin and state of residence explained an additional 1.4%, suggesting that the context in which immigrants are “received” varies in some important ways across people of different national origins to shape dietary changes. When adding covariates at country or U.S. state level to explain the variance at these scales, higher availability of sweets in the country of origin and U.S. state levels of obesity were particularly important variables predicting dietary change. ConclusionsWhile “new” obesogenic and broader nutritional environments the foreign-born are exposed to after immigration may indeed have an impact on nutritional outcomes, “old” environments may continue to leave a mark on people’s dietary choices, and further shape the way in which new environments affect people’s dietary change. Funding SourcesResearch reported in this presentation was supported in part by the NIDDK of the NIH under Award Number R01DK115937. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.