SPONSORED RESEARCH: Testing Intervention Strategies for Addressing Binge Eating and Food Insecurity

March 27, 2026

Pictured Above: Andrea Graham, PhD

Read a Q&A Below:

Andrea Graham, PhD, Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine Department of Medical Social Sciences (MSS) received a grant from the National Eating Disorders Association titled: “Testing intervention strategies for addressing binge eating and food insecurity.”

What are the aims of the project? 

Despite the well‑established link between food insecurity and binge eating, almost no interventions have been developed to address it. This project aims to test whether two different strategies—a financial stipend delivered on two different schedules, and a digital intervention designed by our lab to improve binge eating and weight-related behaviors (“FoodSteps”)—can improve both binge eating and food insecurity among adults who regularly struggle with food access. It builds on the pilot trial of the adapted intervention of FoodSteps for people with food insecurity, results from which showed that when people received a small weekly stipend alongside a supportive digital intervention, they experienced fewer binge‑eating episodes and improvements in food security. Now, in this larger study, the team will compare weekly versus monthly stipend payments to see whether more consistent access to resources helps reduce cycles of overeating associated with the influx and depletion of monthly benefits. It will also evaluate whether adding a digital intervention meaningfully improves eating behaviors and emotional well‑being beyond what financial support alone can achieve. Together, these tests are designed to identify which combination of support is most effective and scalable for improving eating related health in this vulnerable population.

What are your next steps?

As the team prepares to launch this trial, they are expanding partnerships with local organizations working to provide food access to Chicagoans. They aim to create bi-directional learning opportunities, gathering valuable insight about how to engage target audiences, while sharing accessible health information with partners’ communities about the risks related to binge eating and how the services they are testing can support lifestyle changes. Since this trial has a nuanced randomization scheme, the team is making efforts to ensure their materials transparently convey what trial involvement entails through digestible, engaging visuals and language. The team is hard at work internally and in consultation with community partners to translate the promising findings from the pilot trial and the science at play in this upcoming trial to encourage understanding of the importance of the relationship between eating health and food insecurity, which they hope will inspire engagement in this upcoming trial. Lastly, they have begun to engage Northwestern policy experts and municipal government leaders to ensure the outcome of the trial is positioned for subsequent real-world implementation.

What do you hope will come out of this funded research?

By testing multi-level interventions for the growing population of people with food insecurity and comorbid binge eating, the team hopes this project will move the field closer to identifying the most effective strategies for improving eating‑related health outcomes and helping assistance programs and the individuals they serve use their resources more efficiently. To do this, the team must systematically vary these intervention strategies and assess their impact on their own and in combination. They hope to further develop an efficacious digital intervention for this population, which could overcome barriers to care that prevent many individuals in need from accessing critical services – a problem that is exacerbated among marginalized and under-resourced groups who are less likely to seek help for their eating disorder. Concurrently, the team hopes to inform food security policy via structural changes to benefits disbursement schedules, which in turn could improve public health outcomes for this population without increasing economic burden to the state.