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 “These findings add to our growing understanding of food insecurity
and its implications, and demonstrate that food insecurity is an
independent risk factor for mental health problems among
adolescents,” said lead author Dr. Elizabeth Poole-Di Salvo of Weill
Cornell Medical Center in New York.
“According to the most recent data, food insecurity affects nearly
20 percent of U.S. households with children under the age of 18
years,” Poole-Di Salvo told Reuters Health by email.
The researchers used data from a 2007 study of about 8,600 kids ages
12 to 16 years. In most cases a parent, usually the teen’s mother,
was interviewed by phone.
The parents answered questions about economically-based difficulties
in meeting food needs over the past 12 months and completed a
25-item measure of their child’s emotional symptoms conduct
problems, hyperactivity, peer problems and social fit.
According to the results in Academic Pediatrics, 10 percent of kids
in the sample lived in food insecure households, and 11 percent had
parent-reported problems with mental health.
Factors like the teens' grade level, poverty status, household
income below the poverty threshold, unmarried parents, level of
parent education, poor parent health, parent depression, unsafe
school and unsafe neighborhood were all associated with both food
insecurity and mental health risk.
But after adjusting for these and other factors, teens with food
insecurity were 2.3 times as likely to have parent-reported mental
health problems compared to those without food insecurity.
Almost 29 percent of teens with food insecurity had mental health
problems, researchers found, compared to 9 percent of other kids.
This pattern held across subtypes of mental health issues – for
instance, more than 26 percent of kids with food insecurity had
conduct problems, compared to more than 11 percent of other kids.
Similarly, 22 percent of food insecure kids had hyperactivity
compared to 11 percent of other kids, and 20 percent of food
insecure kids had peer problems compared to less than 9 percent of
other kids.
Having access to free or reduced-price school lunch programs did not
change these results, the researchers note.
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“While we cannot infer causality from this study, we suspect that
exposure to food insecurity during adolescence, a period of rapid
brain growth and development, may lead to suboptimal nutrition as
well as increased psychological stress for the family and
adolescent, and may adversely impact adolescent mental health,”
Poole-Di Salvo said.
Teens dealing with food insecurity may be experiencing stress from
the uncertainty of not knowing where their next meal is coming from,
from being hungry or from deficiencies in specific nutrients, added
senior study author Dr. Ruth E. K. Stein of Albert Einstein College
of Medicine and The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Bronx, New
York.
“We cannot definitively rule out that mental health problems also
cause household food insecurity, but that seems less likely,
especially since we controlled for stressful life events and
maternal mental health,” Stein told Reuters Health by email.
Adults and children alike feel health-related results from the most
severe economic stress, said Christian Gregory, an economist
specializing in diet, safety and health economics at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service who was not part
of the new study.
“As someone who really knows well the literature and research about
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), our primary
policy intervention against food insecurity, giving people access to
food or resources to food is really important” Gregory told Reuters
Health by phone.
“Early identification of risk factors for both food insecurity and
mental health problems are critical, and pediatricians can be
instrumental in connecting families to available resources in their
communities,” Poole-Di Salvo said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Q57USl Academic
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