Giving Healthy Meal Kits and Cooking Lessons to Rural Families With Food Insecurity.

Summary

The goal of this clinical trial is to learn if providing healthy meal kits to food insecure families can help lessen the social and emotional impacts of food insecurity on kids and their caregivers in rural Maine. The main questions it aims to answer are:

1. Is receiving healthy meal kits delivered to homes feasible and acceptable to rural Maine families?
2. Does receiving meal kits (along with an app to help learn how to cook the food) improve food insecurity and diet quality in rural Maine families?
3. Does receiving meal kits (along with an app to help learn how to cook the food) improve family function in rural Maine families? We will look at caregivers' stress, family conflict, household chaos, and child emotional-behavioral symptoms.

Participants will:

1. Recieve and prepare a dietitian-designed meal kit with 10 meals per week for 4 weeks.
2. Receive free culinary medicine education via an app that they will continue to have access to after the study ends.
3. Complete a 1-1.5 hour virtual visit at the beginning of and end of the study.

Conditions

• Food Insecurity
• Food Insecurity Among Children
• Social Emotional Wellness
• Caregiver Stress
• Caregiver Distress
• Caregiver Mental Health
• Family Function
• Family Functioning
• Nutrition
• Child Mental Health

Interventions

DIETARY_SUPPLEMENT

Meal Kit plus Mobile Culinary Medicine Education

This intervention will involve four phases: (1) a baseline assessment; (2) a 7-day monitoring phase, (3) a 30-day intervention phase in which all households receive weekly meal kits delivered to their home in addition to mobile culinary medicine education; and (4) a follow-up assessment.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• MaineHealth

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Lauren Ciszak, MD · MaineHealth

• Merelise Ametti, PhD, MPH · MaineHealth

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-04-14

Primary Completion

2025-07-08

Completion

2025-07-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations