Food security is one of the greatest issues facing our time. However, evaluating it as a health concern is is not always clear-cut and different kinds of populations face different kinds of food security issues.
Now a recent piece of research from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has highlighted this by outlining how infants from households that score poorly for food security — i.e. their ability to access healthy and sufficient meals — are more likely to suffer from obesity than those with adequate access to good food.
The study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, followed 666 babies in North Carolina during the course of their first 12 months of life. It weighed and measured them at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months old. It also conducted periodic interviews with the children’s mothers, during which they were asked to answer an official government questionnaire concerning food security although they were not asked anything about their diet during pregnancy.
The researchers found that the babies of mothers who scored low for food security (they were less able to access good food) were the group most likely to exhibit increased fat levels, above average body mass indices (BMIs), higher fat levels, and other obesity risk factors.
The challenge for the authors is to now understand what, on the surface, would appear to be counterintuitive findings. Various theories may explain the research: over compensatory behaviour from worried parents, poor nutrition, poor education, the targeted advertising and promotion of lower quality diets to poorer demographics, and simple overfeeding.
Unfortunately, obesity in babies and young children is indicative of obesity and health challenges in later life. According to a comprehensive review of studies on the subject, obese children are five times more likely to be obese as adults than non-obese children.(1)
It is clear that the question needs to be addressed urgently; worldwide there are more than 1.9 billion overweight adults, with more than 650 million of these classified as obese, while in 2018 there were more than 38 million children under the age of five who were classified as overweight or obese.(2)
In fact, the majority of the world’s population live in countries where you are more likely to die as a result of being obese than underweight.
The John Hopkins study was led by Sara Benjamin-Neelon, PhD, JD, who is the Helaine and Sidney Lerner Associate Professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society. It focused solely on infants from households in Durham, North Carolina. The majority of the children were from households with incomes below $20,000 a year and nearly 70% were African American.
“The findings are especially relevant today when there is such widespread food insecurity in the U.S. due to the COVID-19 crisis,” commented Professor Benjamin-Neelon.
It is interesting to note that even involvement with official government healthy eating food programmes did not seem to reduce an infant’s chances of being obese. For example, those parents who participated in two federal food assistance programs, WIC and SNAP, were just as likely to have overweight and obese children as those who did not.
The study may not provide any answers regarding the question of food insecurity and infant obesity, but it would certainly seem to be a valuable piece of research that will hopefully go some way towards advancing the discussion of food security and obesity.
1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12334
2. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight