ABSTRACT
As the quotation above suggests, food security is increasingly recognized as integral not only to reducing hunger and malnutrition but also to broader development goals. Public health programs and policies often consider underlying social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health, and in many contexts, food security emerges as a prominent factor. Direct effects of food security on health occur through nutritional status, itself a critical component of an individual’s health. For example, child malnutrition is a significant source of child mortality (Black et al. 2013). But in addition to this direct effect, food security also affects health through constraints to accessing health care, expenditure decisions, mental health, and other pathways described in further detail in Chapter 2.
