CHILD FOOD INSECURITY IN THE UNITED STATES ASSOCIATED WITH CHILDREN’S HEALTH STATUS by

Child food insecurity is a growing public issue in the United States. In the past decade, research on the relation between food insecurity and children’s health in the United States has increased exponentially. The purpose of this essay is to summarize current studies and provide a comprehensive understanding of food insecurity situation among children in the United States. In summary, a positive association between mental health and food insecurity was consistently found, while evidence on physical health and food insecurity was not statistically significant among children. Food assistance programs were approved to have positive impacts on recipients. Besides, economic recession caused significant increases in food-insecure rate. Existing studies suffer from the shortage of experimental research, including the understanding of biological causality and confounders’ control. Also, the evaluation of food assistance programs between recipients and non-recipients is hard due to lack of experimental studies. This essay summarized relevant literature and proposed potential explanations for the association between food insecurity and adverse health outcomes. James Peterson, PhD