![]() Eight of the items are focused on children and thus are not used with households that contain no children under age eighteen. 1 The first item addresses worries about food running out, while the remaining items address possible reductions in food intakes because of financial constraints. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) measures food insecurity through responses to a series of eighteen survey questions and statements fielded to roughly 45,000 households in the Food Security Supplement of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS-FSS). ![]() We conclude with policy recommendations for alleviating food insecurity, with a particular emphasis on the current and potential roles of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) in reducing food insecurity and with recommendations for health care professionals. ![]() We therefore suggest future research directions. Within these areas, we emphasize research that reflects the central findings of the literature and that, in many cases, uses state-of-the-art methods.Īlthough the literature has grown considerably in the past few years, there are still some important gaps in our knowledge base. ![]() We therefore concentrate on papers that reflect the most recent work in this area, especially in the fields of economics, internal medicine, nutrition, public health, and social work. Research on food insecurity and health emanates from a broad cross-section of disciplines in both the social and health sciences, and space limitations prohibit a meta-analysis. We then provide a selected review of the literature that has examined the impacts of food insecurity on health outcomes for children, nonsenior adults, and seniors. We begin with an overview of how food insecurity is measured in the United States, followed by a presentation of recent trends in the prevalence of food insecurity. In this article we focus on recent research that examined the association of food insecurity and health. 1 About one-third of these were at a more serious level known as “very low food security.” The fact that so many people are food insecure is important in and of itself, but potentially more concerning are the possible negative health consequences of food insecurity. In 2013 almost fifty million Americans (14.3 percent) were food insecure. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) substantially reduces the prevalence of food insecurity and thus is critical to reducing negative health outcomes.įood insecurity, a condition in which households lack access to adequate food because of limited money or other resources, is a leading health and nutrition issue in the United States. For example, after confounding risk factors were controlled for, studies found that food-insecure children are at least twice as likely to report being in fair or poor health and at least 1.4 times more likely to have asthma, compared to food-secure children and food-insecure seniors have limitations in activities of daily living comparable to those of food-secure seniors fourteen years older. We show that the literature has consistently found food insecurity to be negatively associated with health. Then we present a survey of selected recent research that examined the association between food insecurity and health outcomes. For context, we first provide an overview of how food insecurity is measured in the country, followed by a presentation of recent trends in the prevalence of food insecurity. We examine recent research evidence of the health consequences of food insecurity for children, nonsenior adults, and seniors in the United States. Almost fifty million people are food insecure in the United States, which makes food insecurity one of the nation’s leading health and nutrition issues. ![]()
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