Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith-Roggers.

Today, our topic is food insecurity among adolescents.

I speak with Kristen Mari,

an adolescent health researcher at Johns Hopkins, about why not having enough to eat uniquely impacts young people, and a recent study that suggests that programs meant to combat food insecurity

aren't meeting the needs of adolescents. We also talk about the false claims of policymakers that such programs are unnecessary in light

of childhood obesity.

Let's listen.

Chris and Mari, thank you so much for being on public health on call.

Today, we're talking about food insecurity, particularly among adolescents.

So just to start us off, can you tell us

about food insecurity? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So first we define food insecurity by saying that it's

when a person lacks access to healthy food or nutritious food for normal growth and development.

And this may be caused by either unavailability of food or a lack of resources to obtain food.

And there's different levels of food insecurity, so you can be moderately food insecure to more severe food insecure.

So there's different levels depending on need in terms of when someone is severely food

insecure, that basically means that that person has maybe not eaten for the whole day. So they're

basically what we would call hungry. They're facing hunger. But even those that have moderate

food insecurity, there's still some worries because that

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