Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Obesity: A Conceptual Framework for Research, Practice, and Policy

Alarming trends in obesity and food insecurity in the United States have raised public health concerns and efforts to understand and address these potentially related public health problems. Although much research has been done to discern whether food insecurity is causally related to the obesity epidemic, the evidence to date is mixed. To address a pressing need for greater conceptual clarity regarding these urgent public health problems, our article summarizes findings from research examining the association between obesity and food insecurity in the United States and describes a conceptual framework to characterize the factors that may fuel a cycle of mutual influence among obesity, food insecurity, and their shared mechanisms and health-related outcomes.