Socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors associated with food expense insufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors associated with food expense insufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan Ryoko Katagiri ID1*, Takahiro Tabuchi2, Kota Katanoda3 1 Division of Epidemiology, Institute for Cancer Control, National Cancer Center, Tokyo, Japan, 2 Cancer Control Center, Osaka International Cancer Institute, Osaka, Japan, 3 Division of Surveillance and Policy Evaluation, Institute for Cancer Control, National Cancer Center, Tokyo, Japan a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 * Abstract Objective OPEN ACCESS Citation: Katagiri R, Tabuchi T, Katanoda K (2022) Socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors associated with food expense insufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0279266. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0279266 Editor: Ruwan Jayathilaka, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, SRI LANKA To examine the status of food expense insufficiency in Japan during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors associated with food expense insufficiency. Design Food expense insufficiency before and after the pandemic was assessed. The multivariable-adjusted odds ratio (AOR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated for the association between food expense insufficiency and socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors. Received: January 5, 2022 Accepted: December 3, 2022 Setting Published: December 15, 2022 A large-scale, cross-sectional online questionnaire survey. Copyright: © 2022 Katagiri et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data in this study are not deposited in a public repository because they contain personally identifiable or potentially sensitive information. In line with the regulations for ethical guidelines in Japan, restrictions on data dissemination were imposed by the Research Ethics Committee of the Osaka International Cancer Institute. Details of data availability are available on the JACSIS website (https://jacsis-study.jp/ howtouse/), and all data inquiries will be channeled through the JACSIS research office Participants From August to September 2020, 25,482 participants aged 15–79 years completed the questionnaire (JACSIS 2020 study; Group 1). In October 2020, 917 single parents were surveyed for oversampling purposes. There were 179 single parents in Group 1 and a total of 1096 single parents in Group 2. Results Group 1 and Group 2 had 747 (2.9%) and 55 (5.0%) participants, respectively, who experienced food expense insufficiency for the first time after April 2020. Young age, part-time employment, being a single parent (in Group 1), and the number of people in the household (five or more in Group 1 and child/children alone in Group 2) were significantly associated with food expense insufficiency. As being a single parent was significantly associated with food expense insufficiency in Group 1 (AOR [95% CI] = 7.23 [5.40–9.68]), we further PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279266 December 15, 2022 1 / 13 PLOS ONE () to the Osaka Cancer Institute Institutional Ethics Committee. Funding: This study was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grants [grant number 22K17407 (RK)]. The JACSIS study was funded by the JSPS KAKENHI Grants [grant number 17H03589 (KK); 19K10671; 19K10446; 18H03107; 18H03062 (TT); 21H04856], the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists [grant number 19K19439], Research Support Program to Apply the Wisdom of the University to tackle COVID-19 Related Emergency Problems, University of Tsukuba, and Health Labour Sciences Research Grant [grant number 19FA1005;19FG2001]. The findings and conclusions of this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not represent the official views of the research funders. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Food expense insufficiency in COVID-19 pandemic examined it in Group 2. Single parents who exhibited multiple factors (young age, part-time employment, living only with child/children) were likely to experience food expense insufficiency (15.3–15.8%). Conclusions Triggered by the pandemic, a small percentage of individuals experienced food expense insufficiency. We identified that factors such as young age, part-time employment, and being a single parent were significantly associated with food expense insufficiency, and discovered that a multiplicity of these factors further increased the risk. Our findings suggest an urgent need to support individuals with a potentially high risk of food expense insufficiency. Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues in the middle of July 2021; according to the World Health Organization COVID-19 dashboard, over 195,000,000 cases have been confirmed globally [1]. Due to COVID-19, health inequality has been the focus of attention because of the disproportionately high mortality in ethnic minority groups [2]. Moreover, although a new working style, such as working from home, becomes an option to continue working during movement restrictions, this option is not equally available for all employees and has the potential to exacerbate inequalities [3, 4]. In addition to the high unemployment rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic [5, 6], these situations affect household income [4] and lifestyle, including access to food. Food insecurity is defined as a situation in which access to desirable food is threatened and is often focused on in the context of global health [7]. Food expense insufficiency is one cause of food insecurity. According to a review of high-income countries, food insecurity measures focus on the access dimension of food insecurity because constraints mainly exist in the access dimension in high-income countries [8]. Food access is limited by both physical and economic constraints. As a lack of expenses might be a constraint for food access under the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused on food expense insufficiency in this survey. Overall, food insecurity has received global attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. While several papers have identified vulnerable groups in terms of race or economic status in countries such as the US, Australia, and Nepal, the situation in some other countries remains poorly documented [9–12]. Although studies on the association between socioeconomic status and dietary intake or health outcomes have been published in Japan [13, 14], the prevalence of food insecurity, food expense insufficiency, and related factors are still unknown. Further research (...truncated)