Measures of Food Insecurity/Security

Nutrition education has the potential to play an important role in ensuring food security and improving nutritional status. Therefore, food security is recommended for inclusion in nutrition education evaluation efforts. Considerable progress has been made in developing brief tools that can be used to measure food security at the household level. These tools are reliable in population-based surveys, and some studies have found that measures of food security are associated with nutrient intake. Hence, these tools can be valuable in monitoring, in community needs assessment, and in planning. These tools may also have the potential for use in evaluating nutrition education activities; this potential will be enhanced by research into the capacity of these tools to identify changes within households over time as a result of nutrition education and their sensitivity and reliability in doing so.