This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • World Health  • Diet  • Patient Education/ Health Literacy  • Alert me on articles by topic

Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2007;298:1851-1853.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Nutrition is paramount to health and survival, yet many individuals and families struggle to maintain a healthy diet, especially those with low incomes. Nearly 12.6 million households (11%) in the United States were "food insecure" at times during 2005, meaning they were without the resources to feed themselves enough or were unable for economic reasons to purchase healthful foods, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Most, but not all, of the world's undernourished people live outside the United States, in poor countries. According to a report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, in 2001 to 2003, 820 million of the 854 million undernourished people worldwide were in developing countries, 25 million in the transitional countries, and 9 million in the industrialized countries (http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0750e/a0750e00.htm). In the United States, food insecurity tends to be higher among households with incomes near or . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HEALTH EFFECTS