About this work
Compared with people who have food-security, people experiencing food insecurity typically have worse nutrition and higher risk for diet-related diseases , compounding health and financial disparities. Although the concept of food security technically includes access to nutritious foods, major clinical and public health tools to assess and reduce food security do not consider nutritional quality. For example, the detailed Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) eighteen-question US Household Food Security Survey Module assessment includes no questions about nutritional quality (“balanced meal” is mentioned twice).
Shorter food security screening tools , most often used in public health and clinical practice, also contain no information on nutritional quality. Measurement tools are crucial because measurement drives interventions. When measurement tools focus on stable access to sufficient calories, rather than on access to healthful foods, corresponding major public health, policy, and clinical interventions have a similar focus.
Growing recognition of the distinction between access to calories and access to nourishing foods–or quantity alone versus quantity and quality–has spurred an evolution in health care, public health, and policy toward a new, complementary concept to food security: nutrition security (exhibit 1). A recently proposed definition of nutrition security is “consistent access, availability, and affordability of foods and beverages that promote well-being and pr…
