Ending Hunger IS Health Reform
Posted by Cate Puzo on Friday, October 9, 2009
Think about it. When people—especially kids—don’t get enough nutritious food to eat on a regular basis, they get sick.
There’s growing evidence that uncertain and irregular access to nutritious food (food insecurity) contributes to overweight children, even child obesity…and there is a lot of support about the health conditions that obesity can lead to.
Our youngest children suffer the most profound and long-lasting health consequences: Children under the age of 3 who don’t get adequate nourishment simply do not develop fully, physically, mentally or emotionally—in fact, undernourishment changes the fundamental architecture of their young brains and central nervous system, and not in a positive way. Hungry kids don’t recover from illness or injury well and are often left weakened and more susceptible to future illness or injury.
So what should be done?
Ending hunger, especially childhood hunger, should be a serious part of the health reform debate, at the federal, state and local levels. Ending childhood hunger is solid preventive medicine that doesn’t require a doctor’s visit or prescription, lab tests or, in most cases, months of therapeutic treatment.
It requires relatively simple actions, many of which are underway but aren’t going far enough. Things like improving federal nutrition programs and making sure families who need them know how to take advantage of them, educating families (including the kids) on how to make healthy meals at home on limited budgets, bringing more nutritious yet affordable food (especially produce and fresh meats, fish and poultry) into urban and rural food desert communities…Share Our Strength’s 10-point plan lays it all out.
Making sure that every child in America has enough nutritious food to eat, every day, will not single-handedly reverse childhood illness. Nor will it solve all our health care woes. But it will ensure that America’s kids have a fighting chance to be healthy and to recover from illness when it strikes.
As a community, we need to be thinking and talking about this. Now.
- Find out what your local food bank or pantry is doing, and help them with food, money or volunteering.
- Push your local school district to offer free or reduced-price breakfasts to kids who need them if they aren’t doing so already. Make sure they know that you think ending hunger should be a health care priority.
- Join a local effort to make school meals healthier.
- Support Agriculture Secretary Vilsak’s ideas on streamlining applications for school meals in your own community as a health care measure.
- Don’t assume that your own child’s friends are as well fed as your own—learn from teachers about the signs of childhood hunger and dare to offer a helping hand, snack or meal if you think a hungry child is in your midst.
- Make sure your childcare provider knows about the Child and Adult Care Food Program that can help them provide healthy snacks or suppers to kids in their care, and can help minimize the number of colds and tummy aches they see .
- Bone up on income support and food assistance programs in your area, support improvements in or expansions of them to help local families feed their kids and stay healthy.
- Talk with your health care providers about the signs of childhood hunger they see, and ask how they think they can help.
And, if your family is struggling to keep food on the table, use all the assistance programs available.
There are at least 12 million American kids—and their families—who’ll thank you for helping make hunger the health care issue that it is.
October 9, 2009 | | Tags: child nutrition act, health care, hunger
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