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Comment by searealist | Hacker News Reader

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Cost of food has grown significantly just in the past year or two. In 2022 alone, there was a 45% increase in food insecurity in children of the USA. [0]

0. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760...

Common sense says kids are not growing up hungry. If you look at actual times when they were, like the great depression, kids were rail thin. The opposite is true now. If you read the fine print on these reports they usually boil down to something like: “there is not enough variety in the household”.

You can be hungry and not rail thin. The notion that you need to be starving from malnutrition to be hungry is rather ridiculous.

I was hungry as a child and teenager. This involved things such as not having any food prepared for school, and not having money to buy something myself. Yes, we had dinner, and no, I wasn't starving to death or rail thin. But I was also hungry.

You’re being presented with literal statistics on food insecurity and ignoring what you’re being told.

Many people are both food insecure AND fat because food insecurity drives people to eat as much as they can because of the fear of being hungry later.

The definition of food security was changed in 2006 to eliminate any reference to hunger.

> Low food security—Households reduced the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets, but the quantity of food intake and normal eating patterns were not substantially disrupted. [1]

In other words, by new definitions, if you ever reduce the quality, variety, or even desirability of your food throughout the year, you are considered food insecure.

EDIT: It looks like I'm not allowed to post in this thread anymore. I am quoting the USDA website. Nothing is cherry-picked. I've added a citation.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

Decline in food quality is ostensibly a decline in food security. But any sensible design would not use that as a threshold for defining food security.

Rather than appealing to some unnamed source’s cherry picked definition, you would do better to look at an actual study of food security and see how it was defined. Because a very small amount of common sense suggests to me it’s not what you’re saying.

It's not really eat as much as you can, more eat low quality ultra processed foods that are high in empty calories and low in nutrients.

It’s actually both. It ends up being “eat as much as you can of low quality ultra processed foods that are high in empty calories and low in nutrients,” because that is what is inexpensive

This statement is correct. Don’t downvote it. It also compounds as calorically dense ultra processed foods lack the nutritional content make you stay full

source?

"Not even wrong"

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