Measures of food insecurity/security

Nutrition education has the potential to play an important role in ensuring food security and improving nutritional status. Therefore, food security i s recommended for inclusion in nutrition education evaluation efforts. Cons iderable progress has been made in developing brief tools that can be used to treasure food security at the household level. These tools are reliable in population-based surveys, and some studies have found that measures of f ood security are associated with nutrient intake. Hence, these tools can be valuable in monitoring, in community needs assessment, and in planning. Th ese tools may also have the potential for use in evaluating nutrition educa tion activities; this potential will be enhanced by research into the capac ity of these tools to identify changes within households over time as a res ult of nutrition education and their sensitivity and reliability in doing s o.