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Open any newspaper or news website and it’s clear: Americans are struggling under historic inflation and a cost-of-living crisis.  

Inflation has directly led to rising food insecurity. As the price of food and other essential goods and services increase, many people are forced to make a difficult choice: buy groceries or pay bills? This has caused some 47 million Americans to become food insecure.  

Virginia is no exception to this trend. Voices for Virginia’s Children reports that nearly 12% of children in Virginia live in food insecure households. Community pantries across the Commonwealth are feeling the strain, with Voices for Virginia’s Children also finding that food banks saw a 5-10% increase in demand in 2023 compared to the previous year.  

Experiencing food insecurity can negatively impact nearly every area of a child’s life. Children suffering from chronic hunger are at an increased risk of developing health conditions, poor academic performance, and behavioral health problems. Simply put, children cannot thrive when they’re hungry. 

Another harmful outcome of childhood hunger: childhood obesity. It might seem like a contradiction, but it’s true – food insecurity is deeply connected to overweight and obesity, especially for children. Recent research has found that children from food insecure families were 5 times more likely to be obese than their peers. This relationship is so strong that researchers even have a name for it: the “obesity-food insecurity paradox.”  

There are several potential reasons why food insecurity could lead to childhood overweight and obesity. The first is psychological: Children experiencing food scarcity are more likely to eat past satiety when food is available. Another reason is that families that struggle to afford nutritious whole foods might rely on highly processed, calorie dense foods. Finally, toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences are also linked to childhood obesity, possibly because children experiencing emotional turmoil might turn to food for comfort.  

Addressing childhood food insecurity and obesity is daunting, but some organizations are up to the challenge. VFHY funds 30 grantees across the Commonwealth through healthy community action team (HCAT) grants, and many of them are working in the intersection between food insecurity and childhood obesity.  

One of those grantees is the Orange County Office on Youth in central Virginia, which works with food banks to support community members experiencing food insecurity. The Orange County HCAT operates the Mustard Seed Community Garden, which provided 3,446 pounds of fresh produce to the Love Outreach Pantry over a three-month period in 2024. Their donation helped the Love Outreach Pantry serve more than 1,000 households in that period.  

Another grantee, Sentara RMH Medical Center in Harrisonburg, is launching a produce delivery initiative as part of their Hand in Hand Resource Mothers program, which provides teen mothers with essential goods and support. They used VFHY funding, along with support from a community partner, New Community Project/Vine & Fig, to purchase produce from a local farm and distributed it to the youth in the Hand in Hand program.  

“Locally grown and freshly harvested produce just tastes better than what we typically get in the supermarket…. Additionally, many of the program participants are low income, receiving WIC and/or Medicaid benefits, so this allowed them to stretch their food budgets farther while incorporating fresh produce at the same time, when they typically do not prioritize fresh produce,” said Olivia Haimani, a grant coordinator with Sentara RMH Medical Center.  

Community-level interventions like these can provide vital support to families when systematic interventions are inaccessible or insufficient.  

Learn more about our childhood obesity prevention work here: https://www.vfhy.org/childhood-obesity-prevention/