Is Nutrition Insecurity Making for Unhealthy Americans?
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I’m Haylie Shipp.
According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the definition of “food security” is having, at all times, both physical and economic access to sufficient food to meet dietary needs for a productive and healthy life. A family is food secure when its members do not live in hunger or fear of hunger.
Here in the United States, we are not near as food secure as we’d like to think across the board, but that is a topic for another day. In the meantime, for those that are food secure, are they nutritionally secure?
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says that the Covid-19 pandemic really highlighted an issue on that front...
“We learned from this pandemic, the linkage between nutrition security and health. It was surprising to me, and maybe it was surprising to some of you, that two-thirds of the COVID-related hospitalizations that occurred, and are occurring, have been related to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart failure; these are all diet-related conditions. Stated another way, poor nutrition is connected to the leading cause of illnesses that take over 600,000 lives every year.”
According to Secretary Vilsack, he reports that the USDA is taking steps to integrate nutrition security into its food support programs.
