FOR RELEASE: June 18, 1997
Contact: Susan Lang
Office: (607) 255-3613
Internet: [email protected]
Compuserve: Larry Bernard 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Poor rural women who don't always have enough food in their
homes exhibit binge eating patterns and are only about half as likely as
other women to consume daily the recommended five servings of fruits and
vegetables. Therefore, these women are less likely to consume adequate
vitamin C, potassium and fiber, according to a new Cornell University study.
In one of the first studies to look at how food insecurity affects food
intake in women, the Cornell researchers said that women in food-insecure
households eat particularly less fruit, salads, carrots and other
vegetables than other women while consuming a similar number of calories.
In addition, the researchers report that the more food insecure a woman's
household, the higher she tended to rank on an eating disorder scale.
The researchers suspect that such eating patterns may put food-insecure
women at higher risk for obesity because they overeat at times when
adequate foods become available to the household. Food-insecure women,
therefore, may be at potentially higher risk not only for obesity but also
for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and other chronic
diseases.
In a related study, the researchers found that women who lived in
food-insecure households in rural upstate New York tended to be without
savings, living in larger households, had unexpected expenses and spent
less money on food than other women, and they were more likely to be single
parents. In addition, if the family received food stamps, they were more
likely to report that they had to add $50 or more to meet their family's
food needs for the month.
Similarly, women who had low food supplies in their households tended to
have low education levels, low food expenditures, did not have a vegetable
garden and did not receive free milk, eggs and meat.
"These studies are among the first to use a new and validated measure of
food insecurity status," said Christine Olson, Cornell professor of
nutritional sciences and an expert on hunger. "They help show that while
starvation does not occur in this country to the extent that it still does
in developing countries, food insecurity and hunger certainly do.
Hopefully, these findings will help improve the development and targeting
of interventions to alleviate food insecurity."
With Cornell colleagues epidemiologist Edward Frongillo Jr. and
nutritionists Barbara Rauschenbach and Ann Kendall, Olson measured food
insecurity of 193 women with children living in a rural county of upstate
New York.
The researchers' findings on how food insecurity influences food intake
were published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association (October
1996 ). The study on what factors contribute to household food insecurity
was published in Food Economics and Nutrition Review (1997, Volume 10, No.
2). The researchers' work also was summarized in Human Ecology Forum (Fall
1996).
An expert panel of the American Institute of Nutrition defined food
insecurity as "whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe
foods or the ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable
ways is limited or uncertain." With this definition in mind, Olson then
developed, with former graduate student Kathy Radimer, the new and
relatively simple Radimer/Cornell measure of food insecurity -- a valid and
reliable measure of food insecurity. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) recently commissioned the Census Bureau to include questions from
the Radimer/Cornell scale as part of the Current Population Survey, from
which poverty rates and unemployment rates for the U.S. are derived.
Using the new approach to define and measure hunger, Radimer and Olson
reported in 1992 that food insecurity ranges from mild to severe. Mild
insecurity involves uncertainty and anxiety about having enough food in the
household to affecting what and how adults in the home eat. Households are
considered as undergoing severe food insecurity when the children go hungry.
The Radimer/Cornell measure views hunger not only as a biological
phenomenon but also as social and psychological phenomena and includes
chronic anxiety or worry about not having enough food. Using the new
measure, Olson said that food insecurity in this country has been seriously
understated and much more prevalent than previously estimated.
"We interviewed some women who would periodically go three days without
food and experience up to four months with no income," Olson pointed out.
"In about 10 percent of the households, which was skewed to oversample low
income, children periodically went hungry."
"In general, we found that food insecurity relates to dietary quality in a
way that increases a woman's risk of being unhealthy," Olson said. "Such
findings are important: food-insecure women are potentially at greater
risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes
and hypertension."
In addition, Olson points out that based on their research findings on the
sufficiency of food stamps, proposed changes in the U.S. food assistance
programs may result in increased food insecurity, particularly among
two-parent families with older children who are currently given the same
amount of food stamps as, for example, a single mother with two small
children.
Olson and her colleagues are currently working on research that examines
the relationship between food insecurity and obesity.
The studies were supported, in part, by the New York State Department of
Health, the Cooperative State Research Service of the USDA and the
Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, under
the 1995 Sabbatical Grants Program of the USDA, Food and Consumer Service.
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