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Food Insecurity: A Nutritional Outcome or a Predictor Variable?^1,2,

Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4410

The phenomenon loosely labeled hunger in the 1980s is now being discussed as food security or insecurity. Food security is defined as access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life, and at a minimum includes the following: 1) the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods and 2) the assured ability to acquire personally acceptable foods in a socially acceptable way. Food insecurity exists whenever food security is limited or uncertain. The measurement of food insecurity at the household or individual level involves the measurement of those quantitative, qualitative, psychological and social or normative constructs that are central to the experience of food insecurity, qualified by their involuntariness and periodicity. Risk factors for food insecurity include any factors that affect household resources and the proportion of those resources available for food acquisition. Potential consequences of food insecurity include hunger, malnutrition and (either directly or indirectly) negative effects on health and quality of life. The precise relationships between food insecurity and its risk factors and potential consequences need much more research now that there is an emerging consensus on the definition and measurement of food insecurity. Indicators of food security or insecurity are proposed as a necessary component of the core measures of the nutritional state of individuals, communities or nations.

KEY WORDS: • hunger • food security • nutritional status assessment

¹ Presented as part of a symposium, "Nutritional Assessment and Intervention: Interface of Science and Policy," sponsored by the joint American Institute of Nutrition/American Society for Clinical Nutrition Task Force on Hunger and Malnutrition, given at the meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, Washington, DC, April 4, 1990.

² Guest editor for this symposium was William H. Dietz, Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, New England Medical Center, Boston, MA 02111.

Manuscript received 17 October 1990. Revision accepted 9 January 1991.

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