ITHACA, N.Y. -- Ten million Americans, including almost 4 million children, don't get enough to eat, according to a new study from Cornell University and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Employment is no guarantee of being well fed: More than half of the 4 percent of Americans who say they are sometimes or often hungry live in households in which at least one person has a job.
"Food insufficiency is not limited to the unemployed or to single-mother families," says study lead author Katherine Alaimo, a doctoral candidate in nutritional sciences at Cornell University and a former nutritionist at NCHS. "Although families with single mothers are at higher risk for having inadequate food, more Americans who don't have enough to eat live in families of married couples with children than in other types of families."
Alaimo, together with Christine Olson, her advisor and Cornell professor of nutritional sciences; Cornell statistician Edward Frongillo; and Ronette Briefel of the NCHS, published their study in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health (Vol. 88, No. 3).
Americans most at risk for not having enough to eat are children and the poor, say the study's authors. About 6 percent of children and 14 percent of America's low-income population reported that they don't have enough food to eat.
"Food insufficiency is still a considerable problem in this country and is not limited to very low-income persons, specific racial/ethnic groups, certain family types or the unemployed," Alaimo says.
Among those Americans who reported not having enough to eat in the survey were: