Strengthening Autistic Voices in Original Research (SAVOR) - Food: A Community-Based Participatory Approach to Healthy Policies, Systems, and Environments for College-aged Autistic Adults

Authors

Abstract

As the awareness and understanding of autism has increased over the years, diagnoses have similarly risen, with a current prevalence of 1 in 31 children. This also means that there are more diagnosed autistic students in higher education than ever before, particularly as the prevalence of level 1, or low support needs, autism has risen the quickest. Despite this demographic shift in higher education, postsecondary institutions are not well-equipped to meet the needs of their autistic students. Some institutions, like South Dakota State University (SDSU), have recently implemented autism support services to help such students academically and socially. However, nutrition, health and wellness resources on these campuses have not been structured with autistic needs in mind. This is particularly of concern since autistic young adults have higher odds of eating a poor diet versus allistic (non-autistic) peers, even with other disabilities, putting them at higher odds of obesity, diet-related chronic disease, and ultimately early mortality. Interventions are plentiful to improve autistic nutrition and feeding habits; however, they rarely ever address multi-level components like organizations, communities, and policy that could greatly impact autistic students’ abilities to access and maintain good nutrition. Policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) interventions are a common public health strategy to address multi-level nutrition factors but have not been used with autistic populations in mind. Moreover, the field of autism research often struggles to address needs that are important to the autistic community. While participatory approaches have been used with autistic adults, community-based participatory research (CBPR) models where community-based autistic adults participate as co-researchers are exceedingly rare. Our proposal blends expertise in nutrition, health promotion, and autism to build a CBPR team of neurodiverse faculty researchers, autistic student researchers, and allied community stakeholders to assess, develop, and implement neurodiversity-affirming, campus-based PSE nutrition interventions using the RE-AIM/PRISM integrated dissemination and implementation framework.

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