
Going hungry affects children for their whole lives - pseudolus
https://mosaicscience.com/story/food-poverty-nutrition-health-austerity-child-development-diet-benefits/
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urbanslug
> Hunger during childhood can have a ripple effect that we are only just
> beginning to understand.

I come from Africa and I attend talks at a medical research lab, many of which
often end up involving malnutrition for obvious reasons.

I have seen a lot of research talking about how malnutrition affects kids
intellectual abilities, immunity and more. This is not a problem we are just
begining to understand.

[Edit]

It's also fairly common knowledge that children who get malnourised never
catch up in many facets of life.

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joefourier
I am struggling to understand how not having enough money for food is possible
in a first world country. You can feed yourself for about $1 a day per person
with careful budgeting, or $30/month.

That is the equivalent of 3 hours of work at minimum wage in the UK, and if
that is an amount an individual is unable to spare, then that person clearly
qualifies for governmental assistance, especially one with three dependent
children.

EDIT: See below comment for satisfying the calorie requirements on $1 a day,
or consider that you can get 1 kg of rice for £0.45 which contains 3,650
calories.

~~~
sethammons
Rewind about, jeeze, nearly 20 years for me. A dollar a day is pretty much
what I narrowly avoided starvation on.

I got by on about $20/mo (in addition to free food). I would heat a solitary
potato in a toaster oven for breakfast. Just the potato. After bumming a ride
to high school, I would wait until lunch. I had Free Lunch (I was poor). That
was usually a hamburger, a milk, and something resembling some kind of
vegetable approximation. I would steal one additional hamburger and sell it
for $0.50 or $0.75 (don't recall which) which was a deal to the other person.
On the way home, I would stop by the store and turn that profit into a single
can of Campbell's soup. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes, I could not get a
hamburger to steal, so no dinner. Nothing on the weekend unless I could bum
food at friend's houses (worked out more often than it probably should have).
When I got to university, I could reliably get closer to $2/day and that meant
that I could get a Jumbo Jack and two tacos for lunch. If I chose to not eat
for a few days, I could get a Little Caesar's pizza.

There were periods of more food or less. Things got better over time. By my
second year at university, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I (and our small
kid) were eating regularly. I think our budget was $30/week. I put on like
60lbs in two or three months. I had folks I barely knew tell me I was looking
better. But man, I can recall just wanting enough liquidity to be able to
afford a dang pizza. That lasted until well after getting my degree.

~~~
oarabbus_
If you don't mind me asking or answering, what put you in such dire
circumstances growing up? Low income family, or were there other factors?
Totally understand if you prefer not to discuss.

~~~
sethammons
Happy to talk about most of it. It was my normal then. I like me, and my
history is part of that, so, yeah, no worries writing a bit about it. Low
income for sure. At one point, my dad took off to go live with his girlfriend
and that left me at the house. He eventually came back, but I was on my own
for quite a while. I did not have a vehicle yet and we were 10 miles outside
of town in a small mountain community. Kinda hard to get a job. I heated my
water and cooked my food on a wood burning stove and took cold showers for a
while. I would usually get rides to school from my buddy down the street. If
he couldn't, then I'd ask a neighbor. The other part to understand is this did
not feel "dire" \-- only in retrospect as a well-to-do software developer am I
like "yeah, I guess that was abnormal." It is part of who I am.

So, more crazy story time. When my dad took his hiatus, he left the house in a
state of semi-construction. He had tore down a wall to do some addition
(really, no clue how he was planning on affording that). That made heating
kinda hard in the mountains in winter haha. Winters would get down into the
20s (f) at times. I mostly kept to the back bedroom at that point (where the
wood stove was) and took some plastic sheeting and made a partial barrier to
channel some heat into the restroom. I once came home to find that raccoons
had tore up all my food stores. As I was cleaning up, they tried to come back
to get "their" food. Stubborn things. I was throwing stuff and shouting at
them and they were just like, "yo, bro, you done? we gots to eat." Finally ran
them off. Learned to be better about how I stored any extra food I might
scavenge up.

To add some more color, this above was when I was about 17. Two years prior, I
became a dad. So my then-girlfriend-now-wife (still together 20+ years later,
and I'm paying for my oldest to go to college which feels nice) was living at
a way different spot on the mountain. So I would get rides for the ~50 miles
or so over to her place on weekends when I could. I did not live with her at
the time for a couple of reasons. Most of which was I was determined to
graduate high school and get into college, but also her situation was not much
better than mine aside from some state aid.

Eventually, graduated high school, got a (nearly) full academic scholarship to
a nearby university. By the second year, an uncle had given me a small truck
so I was mobile and able to do graphic design work for the university. My wife
and I were able afford a (very) small wedding and move in together. Things
have been hard, but they always are getting better. I've worked in photography
and design during school, after in insurance, stocks and mutual funds, I've
been a math teacher, did some construction, and most recently I am a software
developer. I've really found my calling here and I have been blessed with a
fantastic company to work for, great friends at work, a healthy family (now
three kids), and a very supportive wife. We are living the dream and we are so
very far removed from our humble beginnings. It really was a lifetime ago. I
really don't regret a thing (though it would have been nice to have been as
well off as we are now much earlier haha). I've known folks with really messed
up history and I've heard real horror stories of how others have grown up. My
story is really not all that bad.

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mruts
My wife is an evolutionary anthropologist and she says that you set your
baseline for life under the age of 5. Things like metabolism, reproductive
strategies, etc.

There is this great study of Indian girls adopted from an orphanage into
Western families. After being adopted, the girls reached menarche at the ages
of 7 or 8. The evolutionary signals are clear: if you are starving and then
get a huge influx of calories, your body interprets this as temporary so you
better reproduce while the going is good.

~~~
maerF0x0
I didnt downvote, but a source/link would be interesting

~~~
mruts
This one of them. Apparently it’s been replicated a couple times.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a6eb/0fba1aa656d7f4f9617c7d...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a6eb/0fba1aa656d7f4f9617c7d35915807f58b94.pdf)

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babyslothzoo
Food addiction, overeating, and the resulting obesity also affect children
(and adults) their whole lives, leading to immense increase in disease and a
shortened lifespan, amongst other problems.

What a strange situation we have where there are people simultaneously
starving with insufficient food and nutrition, and also a massive population
that is dramatically overfeeding their way into catastrophic health problems.

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aszantu
my guess would be that the protein will be too low and the quality of carbs
are bad at poor households. my depression went away after switching to high
fat/no carb with at least 20 gramms of protein per meal. So poor people prolly
get more calories from refined sugar and cheap carbs.

When younger, I was hungry in school and would sometimes be in pain from it.
Never stopped worrying about food ever since. Most of my anxiety is gone now,
but I keep cat food just in case and insects(mealworms) as a secondary food
source should things ever go so bad that everything falls appart.

~~~
jandrewrogers
The nature of "poor people food" varies widely depending on where you are and
what is cheap locally. Rural poor, for example, often have game animals and
garden vegetables as a significant part of their diet, which is pretty healthy
as such things go. When I lived in the Palouse, lentils and peas figured
prominently because those were local crops and therefore approximately free.
The diets of the urban poor are admittedly worse in my experience.

~~~
maerF0x0
+1-ing on that to add also "poor" sometimes means access, not $ .

For example some "food deserts" exist where the most available food is also
the least healthy.

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musicale
Fortunately in the US we have largely replaced hunger with obesity. ;-(

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irrational
What about kids that choose not to eat? I served chicken cordon bleu last
night and half the kids revolted and decided that going to bed hungry was
better than eating.

Seriously though, our middle child won't eat anything. He basically subsist on
baby carrots and chicken nuggets. He's been like that since he was 3 years
old. We thought he'd eventually outgrow it, but he is 14 now and is about 18"
shorter than all his peers. We've taken him to doctors and psychologists and
other people who specialize in this kind of stuff to no avail. I can't help
wondering if he will be similarly affected as mentioned in the article.

~~~
RHSeeger
My daughter won't each cheese. Except for mac-and-cheese, and cheese raviolis,
and a dozen other things that have cheese. Basically, anything she liked
before she decided she didn't like cheese, or that she didn't know had cheese
before she decided she like it. How do you not like cheese?!? It took over
year to convince her that pizza had the good type of cheese.

~~~
grawprog
Sounds like my sister. She never got over it. Still hates cheese. Eats many
things with cheese in it, unless the cheese is extremely prominent. She'll eat
a pepperoni and cheese pizza, but not a straight up cheese pizza for example.

~~~
swsieber
I'd be tempted to make her sausage pizza every time she came over and just
slowly reduce the amount of sausage on it ever time... (or mini-pepperoni -
the important thing is that it's small).

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blancheneige
TLDR for those of us who have a job?

~~~
BlackLotus89
> In one six-year study, McIntyre and colleagues found that young people who
> had experienced hunger had a significantly higher risk of developing
> depressive symptoms. And another large analysis showed that children who
> went hungry were similarly at risk of developing some kind of health problem
> within the next ten years. Hunger, the researchers wrote, had a “toxic”
> effect:

~~~
blancheneige
Thanks. I wonder if child hunger and subsequent depression are really just two
symptomatic manifestations of the same underlying cause (e.g. socioeconomic
issues increasing the likelihood of either) rather than being causally
related.

