AAP urges Doctors to Pay Attention to Food Insecurity

In the policy statement, the AAP suggests doctors ask families two questions based on children’s expression of hunger: Whether they have been anxious in the previous 12 months if their food would run out before getting money to buy more; and whether in the last 12 months their food had run out before they had money to buy more.

An estimated 7.9 million kids in the USA live in “food-insecure” households.

Children and teens who don’t get enough to eat are sick more often, are slower to recover from illness and are hospitalized more frequently than those with good diets. Mariana Chilton, the director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel University, said that food-insecurity is linked with increased numbers of hospitalizations along with poor childhood development and health.

Because it can be complicated, and hard to know when a family or child is experiencing food insecurity or hunger, the AAP is recommending a fairly common screening procedure a physician can use during any regular office visit. Families who rely on SNAP – the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps – tend to eat about the same number of calories as higher-income Americans.

“There’s a biology to food insecurity that’s complex and not clear, but when you see things like stress and what it can do to DNA, then it’s more than just a matter of being poor or making poor choices – there’s metabolic and physiologic changes”, Cook, who was not involved with the study, told MedPage Today. “A child might come in with headaches, they might come in with stomach aches, they may come in with anxiety, now we need to start thinking about how maybe food is an issue”, said Dr. Neary. More serious consequences such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life have been also linked to childhood malnutrition. In their policy statement, the AAP said the problem affects Americans in all areas of the nation including many surprising and unexpected regions; “This demographic of food-insecure Americans extends far beyond the areas of concentrated urban poverty and into suburbs and rural America, areas often mistakenly thought to be immune to this problem”.

With the significantly high prevalence of food insecurity among families with children, as well as the identified possible health effects, pediatricians are urged to become aware of the resources that could ease up food insecurity.

And it may be as simple as asking a couple of questions: did you ever worry about food running out before you could buy more, and did groceries last long enough to cover meals before money was available.

Dr. Sarah Jane Schwarzenberg, a pediatric gastroenterologist and hepatologist at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital, is the lead author of the new policy statement. It also allows pediatricians to encourage parents, as millions of families with problems such as unemployment and poverty are in the same boat.

Despite improvements over the past few years, the latest data show that more than 15 million US children live in households still struggling with hunger. And yet, it’s perhaps the most important factor in a child’s health. “That’s what is happening in homes in America right now”.

Thompson hoped universal screenings for hunger “would take away the embarrassment of having to reach out yourself, because it does take a lot of courage to talk to your pediatrician about not being able to feed your kids. It’s embarrassing as a parent”.