Dieticians speak about food insecurity issues

In light of the more than 26 million Americans currently using the government’s food stamp program, foods and nutrition researcher Carol Boushey has spent her time looking at food insecurity, the availability of food and the ability to get it.\nTo help tie up March’s National Nutrition Month, dietician Samantha Schaefer and other staff members from Bloomington Hospital invited Boushey and her colleague, Heather Eicher-Miller, to speak about “Public health ramifications of food insecurity in the United States,” Schaefer said. About 50 IU students, hospital employees and Bloomington citizens attended to hear the speakers, both of whom work for the Department of Foods and Nutrition at Purdue University.\nBoushey described food insecurity as a “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate or safe foods needed to live an active, healthy life.”\nBoushey and Eicher-Miller said factors such as unemployment, low-paying jobs, high housing costs and poverty cause most cases of food insecurity. Their statistics included only individual houses, not the homeless.\n“Homes don’t stay food-insecure for the entire year,” Eicher-Miller said. “Insecurity tends to be more prevalent in the winter months.”\nWhile many programs offer assistance such as food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children welfare program, reduced school lunches and emergency food pantries, the speakers said this may not always be enough.\n“We can’t assume when someone’s on food stamps they have enough food to feed their family,” Boushey said.\nBecause of the lack of access to sufficiently nutritious foods, Boushey and Eicher-Miller said many people in food insecure homes become obese, especially women. Eicher-Miller, whose main focus is children, said she found one study which showed that children in food insecure households were much heavier than average for their height.\nThough they said they have not done enough research on the issue to do more than speculate, Eicher-Miller believes it food insecurity leads to people to be unhealthier, with more frequent stomachaches and headaches.\n“I liked that they correlate problems with the lack of food access for some people with how it manifests as different health conditions,” said Samantha Kirsch, a second-year medical student. “It’s something we should be getting better at but we are not.”