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Review
. 2023 Jun 9;132(12):1692-1706.
doi: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.123.322065. Epub 2023 Jun 8.

Diet and Food and Nutrition Insecurity and Cardiometabolic Disease

Eric J Brandt  1   2 , Dariush Mozaffarian  3 , Cindy W Leung  4 , Seth A Berkowitz  5 , Venkatesh L Murthy  1
Affiliations
Review

Diet and Food and Nutrition Insecurity and Cardiometabolic Disease

Eric J Brandt et al. Circ Res. .

Abstract

Poor nutrition is the leading cause of poor health, health care spending, and lost productivity in the United States and globally, which acts through cardiometabolic diseases as precursors to cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other conditions. There is great interest in how the social determinants of health (the conditions in which people are born, live, work, develop, and age) impact cardiometabolic disease. Food insecurity is an example of a powerful social determinant of health that impacts health outcomes. Nutrition insecurity, a distinct but related concept to food insecurity, is a direct determinant of health. In this article, we provide an overview of how diet in early life relates to cardiometabolic disease and then continue to focus on the concepts of food insecurity and nutrition insecurity. In the discussions herein we make important distinctions between the concepts of food insecurity and nutrition insecurity and provide a review of their concepts, histories, measurement and assessment devices, trends and prevalence, and links to health and health disparities. The discussions here set the stage for future research and practice to directly address the negative consequences of food and nutrition insecurity.

Keywords: body mass index; cardiovascular disease; coronary disease; diet, food, and nutrition; nutrition policy.

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Conflict of interest statement

Disclosures None.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Moving from food sufficiency to nutrition security in the United States.
Adapted from Thorndike et al. Illustration credit: Sceyence Studios.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Mechanisms by which food and nutrition insecurity connect to cardiometabolic disease (CMD).
Illustration credit: Sceyence Studios.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. Achieving nutrition security from health care to population health.
Strategies to address nutrition insecurity can be conceptualized as a pyramid of programs and interventions targeting both treatment and prevention across different populations. Adapted from Mozaffarian et al. Illustration credit: Sceyence Studios.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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