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Kerry Wright was not hungry. Not as you might expect. Her belly groaned, yes, she could hear it. She just could not feel it. She called it "famine mode". Wright, a mother of three living in Aberdeen, had reached a low point. But she had to provide for her children, who had just entered their teenage years.
By the time she was faced with the opportunity to watch her own children go away, she was out of touch with her parents and the rest of her family. She wanted a new beginning. Except that at that time, in 2013, a new beginning seemed rather distant. His partner was gone and his benefits were inadequate. From time to time, she held domestic jobs but never made enough money. She scanned her closets in desperation, hoping that there would be enough soup or bean cans to at least take the next lunch together.
As there was always so little to do, she quickly skipped meals. The effects soon materialized. She was tired all the time – and yet she could not sleep. She was hungry, but she did not want to eat, and if she did, she would sometimes be sick. His head was tired. It was difficult to keep a series of thoughts together.
Wright was exhausted but desperate not to reveal the extent of his fatigue to his children. So she was walking around the house with one hand on the furniture, standing firmly. She eventually learned that she was suffering from a severe iron deficiency, causing this terrible fatigue, which had also caused her to feel dizzy.
But it was not his own well-being that worried him the most. It was his children. Despite all her efforts, she could not hide the fact that she was not doing well. They asked her questions: Why did she always have her head spinning? Why did she take these pills from the doctor?
And one day, she came home to find a glbad of milk on the table. His son, worried for her, had poured it. He made her drink while he was watching – to make sure that she had everything.
"It should not be like that," she says. "Children should not worry about their parents like that."
Today, his biggest concern is not that his physical health suffers, but the mental health of his children. What psychological scars were left after seeing their mother starve?
What happened to Wright and his family is common to many more households in rich countries than some people think. Food insecurity, also known as food poverty, is on the rise in the UK, the ninth richest country in the world. The exact extent is unknown. But many other countries are grappling with this problem. For example, millions of families in Europe, the United States and Canada are facing food insecurity.
Food banks, which provide free food to people in need, have become increasingly common in areas where food insecurity has become a persistent problem. (The Trussell Trust, which manages food banks in the UK, recently announced a 19% year-over-year increase in the number of food packages distributed in the UK – up to 1.6 million in total .) But even groups like Trussell Confidence agrees that food banks can not be a long-term solution. The food they provide can vary in quantity and quality – often it is nutritionally limited. According to charities, systemic reform is needed to prevent families from falling into the trap of hunger.
Scientists have shown that hunger is not just a pbading thing. Hunger during childhood can have a training effect that we are just beginning to understand. The long-term physical and psychological consequences of hunger are serious and affect the health of society itself. Food insecurity may be a time bomb for today's hungry generations – how dangerous is it?
It's in a charity that has helped locals find employment that someone first mentioned the term "food bank" in Wright. But she hesitated at this idea. "Not at all," she thought. She was terrified that if she asked for help from a food bank, social services would take her children. She felt that it was a reflexive reaction left from her childhood. His own parents were suspicious of outside agencies and told their children that if anyone came to the house, "shut your mouth".
So Wright made a plan. She would rather apply for a volunteer at the food bank. "I felt a little better," she says, "it's a bit of a job."
As a volunteer, she could receive support, some food. It was worth it to try. In the early days, she felt clumsy and out of place. But then, one of the workers, Kelly Donaldson, took her under his wing. She quickly learned what Wright was going through. Donaldson was therefore occasionally preparing a small packet of food for his new friend at the end of the day. "It's your dinner tonight," she said to Wright encouragingly, handing him the bag.
This food bank was the center of Aberdeen operated by Community Food Initiatives North East, known as CFine. In addition to the food bank, CFine offers cooking clbades and subsidized fruits and vegetables. And it was at CFINE headquarters that I met Wright for the first time in person. I arrive on a busy Wednesday, while people are lining up for three-day food parcels. The badistants transmit specific items in the form of small queues at the door.
The food parcels are presented in the form of indefinable white bags, filled with milk, several cans, cereals, rice or pasta and a sauce. In about 20 minutes, two rows of bags stacked on shelves disappear. It will not be long before they are replenished. I am told that a few weeks ago, CFine distributed 179 of these bags in one day, the highest number ever recorded by the charity.
The use of food banks in Aberdeen is high. There are 20 such services in the city – more than any other city in Scotland, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, which are more populated. Food banks are becoming more prevalent in many places – for example, in rural communities in the United States, in Canadian cities, and in rich European countries. Scotland is by no means an exception.
Before we have the opportunity to meet, I see Wright coming into an interview room to give advice to a young man. He has long hair, camo pants. His dog came with him. Wright is now part of the team's financial capability. It's his job to help people manage their finances. The role is to help them apply for benefits – exactly the kind of hoops she had to learn to go through herself to feed her family.
Wright tells me that she always worries about what her children have experienced.
"The health of my children has not been compromised physically, but I would say in terms of mental well-being, absolutely," she says. "They were worried and worried about their mother. They were eager to go to school because they were not sure what was happening with my health. "
The signs are multiplying: more and more children from rich countries are suffering from hunger and its negative effects. A little more than a week before my visit to Scotland, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights had criticized the British government for the scenes of poverty it had witnessed during a trip to the UK. The extent of child poverty in the United Kingdom was, he said, "not only a shame, but also a social calamity and an economic disaster".
The situation is not better on the other side of the Atlantic. In the United States, one in five children goes to school hungry. The UN Special Rapporteur visited Canada in 2012. He also found that food insecurity was a growing problem.
Wherever hunger is increasing, the implications are bad. The Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and the Trussell Trust are among those who are concerned about the effects of food insecurity on children's health. But what exactly would these effects be?
In a phone call to Valerie Tarasuk at the University of Toronto, I mention Kerry Wright's experience and concerns about the mental well-being of her children.
"The woman is obviously very clever," says Tarasuk. "That's exactly what we need to worry about these kids."
Tarasuk is a professor of nutrition sciences and a specialist in the relationship between food insecurity and health. She and her colleagues badyzed national data on tens of thousands of Canadians to show that the more people who are severely affected by food insecurity, the more likely they are to seek help from health services. But she is also following research that explores the long-term effects on children living in food-insecure households.
Studies conducted by a team at the University of Calgary, including Sharon Kirkpatrick and Lynn McIntyre, showed that just a few hungry hunger was badociated with poorer physical and mental health. It also means that children are less likely to finish school.
In a six-year study, McIntyre and his colleagues found that hungry youth had a much higher risk of developing depressive symptoms. And another big badysis showed that children who were hungry also had the risk of developing a type of health problem over the next 10 years. The researchers wrote that hunger has a "toxic" effect: "Higher risks of chronic diseases and asthma have been observed among young people who had experienced several episodes of hunger compared to those who do not. were never hungry
These results have held up even when other factors likely to influence health have been taken into account – hunger actually seems to play a determining role.
"The exposure of children leaves an indelible mark," says Tarasuk. "It's really a bad idea to let so many people languish in this situation."
The team focuses initially on young people having one of four conditions: "tracer": eczema, constipation, asthma and epilepsy.
In the United Kingdom, it is difficult to obtain long-term data such as those used by Tarasuk and his colleagues. However, efforts have been made to expand our knowledge of the relationship between food insecurity and health, albeit in rather localized contexts.
A major research effort by King's College London is currently underway in two large districts south of the capital, Lambeth and Southwark. It is led by Ingrid Wolfe, also pediatric consultant. She says that part of the motivation was to see more children admitted to emergencies with seizures caused by vitamin deficiencies. "Extremely serious malnutrition," she says.
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The Children and Youth Health Partnership (CYPHP, ironically pronounced "smart") is the effort of Wolfe and his colleagues to study the biopsychosocial context of youth who use health care. In other words, it is an attempt to understand what is happening in a young person's life that may have influenced the condition that brings him to the doctor.
The team initially focuses on youth with one of four screening conditions. There are now about 1,000 CYPHP participants and the program will increase in the coming years.
Wolfe says participants fill out a detailed online questionnaire about their home life. Questions include the stability of the family environment, food and the social life of young people.
It already seems that food insecurity is a more important factor in the health of young people than previously known. Among the participants suffering from constipation, for example, food insecurity became a concern in 90% of cases.
In the end, CYPHP seeks to improve children's health by looking for factors that can affect well-being so that they can be treated – rather than waiting for children to seek medical treatment. In this case, compositional problems could be much more difficult to solve.
The fact that food insecurity in a rich country may be so detrimental to the long-term health of the child is disturbing. Even more disconcerting is the realization that while Canada and the United States have made efforts to track food insecurity among the population, there is no equivalent measure in the United Kingdom. However, this will soon change: the Department of Work and Pensions must include issues related to food insecurity in its annual survey on the standard of living of households. The first data will be available in 2021.
The conditions badociated with food insecurity are already very visible for doctors. Ronny Cheung, consultant pediatrician in London, regularly observes the effects of hunger in children. It sends me data that show how, over the last 20 years, England has seen a noticeable increase in the number of cases of rickets requiring hospitalization. There are now more hospitalizations for rickets than ever before in the last five decades. Rickets may not always be diet-related, as lack of vitamin D may also be caused by lack of sunlight. However, "nutritional rickets" can be diagnosed if it becomes clear that a child's dietary intake has been insufficient.
When I meet him in a small office located in a central London hospital, Cheung remembers the case of an 18-month-old boy that he had treated recently. The boy's mother had taken him to the general practitioner because he had trouble learning to walk. When Cheung brought it for a more detailed review, it became clear why. He was severely rainbow, a symptom distinct from rickets. Not only that, but the boy had developed noble bones at the ends of the ribs, called rachitic rosary.
"It's really rare," Cheung told me. "It looks like school material that nobody sees, and that kid had it because the deficiency was so bad."
After discussing his diet with the boy's mother, it became clear that this was a case of nutritional rickets. After a series of supplements followed by an improved diet, the boy's rickets reversed. At such a young age, children grow so fast that their bones can correct themselves, provided the body starts to receive the right nutrients.
When we see peaks of rare diseases, it tells us that there is a problem for which we do not test or that we are not aware of – Ronny Cheung
Cheung thinks we should not consider such cases as anomalies. "When we see an outbreak of rare diseases, it tells us that there is quite a problem that is not tested or that we do not know. This is a tag, right? That's what it is. "
We know that malnutrition can affect the health of children. But what is really happening in the body here? Besides decreasing vitamin D levels, what more could be different from the nutrient intake of a malnourished child?
Tip the scales
In a home where parents or guardians depend on cheaper foods, the consumption of sugary and fatty foods by children will generally increase. Diets may become less balanced and micronutrient intake will decrease. Among the first deficiencies that could appear are iron deficiency – as Kerry Wright notes – as well as vitamin A and iodine deficiency.
Iodine – abundant in white fish and dairy products – is especially important for brain development. According to the British Medical Association, iodine deficiency is "the leading cause of preventable mental retardation and avoidable brain damage, its most devastating impact on the fetal brain and young developing children during the first years of life."
And do not forget about obesity. People sometimes hear the word "malnutrition" and think it means a lack of food, which has the effect of making someone dull and emaciated. In fact, while undernourishment is a form of malnutrition, obesity is another. It's just the other end of the scale.
The Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health says that obesity is correlated to deprivation. "In England, it seems that overweight and obesity may decrease over time among the less disadvantaged, but not among the most disadvantaged."
Unfortunately, a deficient diet can never provoke a reaction from doctors unless these problems become serious. Kelly Donaldson, Wright's friend at CFine, explains that she and her three children have become obese due to the need to consume cheap and easy-to-prepare foods. "It was pretty easy to take as a bag of chips and a bag of sausages rather than go out and buy healthier things," she says. "The doctor said that they were pretty healthy, just a little" chubby ", I think that was the word he used."
When Donaldson learned how healthy eating can be when working at CFine, she changed her cooking habits at home. She has already noticed weight loss in her youngest boy.
Plan improvement can not simply be done by food banks. Even the organizations that run them say it. But there is another way – a so-called "person-centered approach".
This is currently happening in the UK, but not in hospitals or medical practices. It's the work of charities.
Care in the kitchen
"I love talking to people," Sheena Boyd says with a big smile. "You'll understand it at the end of the day." She laughs heartily. She is a project manager for a charity called Centrestage, based in Kilmarnock, southwest of Glasgow. His job is to manage two programs: one that provides fresh meals to people living in disadvantaged areas and another that organizes community cooking clbades.
Before working here, Boyd was employed by a bank. Then her friend, who worked for Centrestage, took her to visit the activities of the organization. She was overwhelmed. Her friend announced that there was a vacancy – it was to Boyd if she wanted to. She did not have to think twice before accepting.
"I just saw the help given to these people, which I was not able to do at the bank," she says. The spark had inflamed his mind: "I can go out and help these people."
When Centrestage was launched 13 years ago, its founders had no intention of feeding the population. They wanted to provide a theater troupe to the locals. The idea was to make big shows with a little more buzz and spice than is possible for school theater departments, for example. In addition, no one could participate, regardless of age or background.
Only when leaders started working more closely with local communities did they realize that food insecurity was such a problem. In fact, it could even be an obstacle for people involved in a theater project. If you are hungry, do not expect to play in front of hundreds of people or work behind the scenes for hours.
Centrestage continues to feature community programming, but belly filling is now a key goal. The group's slogan is "Fun, food, folk".
"It's our motto," says Boyd. "Everything is fun, everything is done so that people are relaxed, that they feel welcome, that they do not feel intimidated, that they do not feel judged."
She has seen for herself that lack of food can have negative effects on young people. Children can become hungry – but they can also feel the opposite effect. For children with ADHD, for example, hunger can trigger hyperactivity. During a cooking clbad, Boyd's efforts to start the clbad were hampered by a boy running around the room. She distributed sandwiches. "Once he ate, he calmed down," she says.
Centrestage's On the Road is a double-decker bus that moves and serves meals. Boyd can not wait to show me the bus, which is today in an area called Shortlees, in South Kilmarnock, where, shockingly, 37% of children live in poverty. But before I see the bus, I have to attend the kitchen, which produces thousands of dishes each week, says Boyd.
We arrive at a large gray warehouse located in an industrial area. The sky is gray too. But when the door beeps when we enter the Centrestage unit, the smell of cooking gives color. Heads hurry, wearing black and comfortable walking shoes, with pitchers of different mixes or huge trays for ovens.
The portions of food cooked here are given to the people of the places Centrestage. You can also buy them at the cafe for a pound or more. I'm trying a little later – pasta with roasted vegetables, a tasty sauce and cheese sprinkled with dusting. A really nice meal. Also available that day was Paneer Curry with rice and jars of red pepper soup.
As bus driver Ian Maconochie says, food banks often ask for vouchers (or "chitties") before handing out supplies. "Naï chitties here," he said, "nae chitties.
Volunteers will be happy to distribute food for free, although they ask if people can try to make a budget each week and make a small donation, say a pound or two pounds. In any case, says Maconochie, nobody turns away. The number of people using the bus and other Centrestage food distribution points is staggering. Between July and September 2018, adults received food nearly 6,000 times and children about 2,200 times.
The other part of Boyd's role is to help people learn to cook to better manage on their own. Centrestage has acquired a former school in Kilmarnock which, in the next few years, will be reorganized to become the headquarters of the charity. The old canteen will become a café serving low cost meals. The meeting room will be converted into their flagship theater space. Clbadrooms will be distributed to local initiatives seeking to teach people skills such as hairdressing.
And the former home economics department will be the place where Boyd will hold his cooking clbades. The first time she saw the rows of sinks and hobs, she was submerged. "I just burst into tears," she recalls.
Boyd and his colleagues, as well as many volunteers, try to fight poverty intentionally and holistically. Hunger can very quickly affect people's health, but that's never the whole story. Thus, in addition to meals and inexpensive cooking workshops, Centrestage staff and volunteers aim to help you with benefit forms, housing requests or employment issues. The woman who was taking her daughter on the bus was right: it's not a food bank. It's much more than that. As Boyd says, "We can say," Well, what's going on? We can help you in any other way. "
Kerry Wright and his CFine colleagues in Aberdeen are also offered a wide range of support to local people. Charities like this one have the goal of putting the skin of something much more important: deprivation itself. Food may be the first thing that brings someone to the door.
CFine CEO Dave Simmers would like his organization to help people help themselves. But the level of crisis he sees people in terms of managing the food bank is also critical.
"We do not like food banks at all," he says, as workers hand out food parcels just steps from his office door. "They are not useful, they erode dignity, they create dependency and they do not change anything.
"But, basically, people are hungry."
CFine's food bank may have saved Wright's life, although she apparently showed up as a volunteer rather than a user. And yet, Simmers' argument that food banks are useless makes sense in the broader context of a hungry nation. Improving the benefit system's equity, monitoring and protecting children's nutrition would be a first step that could help families no longer depend on food banks.
Transform lives
For Wright, it was working for a charity in the food industry that had really set it back, not access to free food. Today, she expresses a real zeal for the work she is doing. She now works 29 hours a week at CFine. She finally has a regular income. This year, she says, she will not be in debt for the first time in a long time. She is very careful, though. If the weather is a little cold, she tries not to put another £ 10 in the gas meter – in case it means she runs out of food the next week.
But the physical health of his children is good. They became more active. Now they play sports and one goes to cadets.
And when I meet her at CFine, I have the feeling that Wright, like her friend Kelly Donaldson, has found a role that has not only helped her here and now – it's something she can rely on.
"I have a loyalty to me," she says. "Because they really help people transform their situation. This has an effect on physical health, mental health and life situations. "
Donaldson speaks and emphasizes how much happier Wright is now. She gets up every day. The makeup. Go to work. It makes a huge difference – for the whole household.
"That's the case," Wright says. "It has an impact on your children."
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This article has been published for the first time on Mosaic by welcome and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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