title: Latino Mothers' Cumulative Food Insecurity Exposure and Child Body Composition.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To document whether an intergenerational transmission of food insecurity is occurring by assessing low-income foreign-born Latino mothers' experiences with food insecurity as none, once (either childhood or adulthood) or twice (during both childhood and adulthood). Also the association between maternal cumulative food insecurity and children's body composition was examined.
  
  
  METHODS
  Maternal self-reported surveys on retrospective measures of food insecurity during childhood, current measures of food insecurity, and demographics were collected from Houston-area community centers (N = 96). Children's body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) were directly assessed. Covariate-adjusted logistic regression models analyzed the association between cumulative food insecurity experiences and children's body composition.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Fifty-eight percent of mothers experienced food insecurity both as a child and as an adult and 31% of the mothers experienced food insecurity either as a child or adult. Maternal cumulative exposure to food insecurity was unrelated to BMI but was negatively related to elevated WC.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Although an intergenerational transmission of food insecurity does exist, maternal cumulative exposure to food insecurity does not impact children's body composition negatively in the short term. Studying the long-term effects of cumulative food insecurity exposure can provide information for the development and timing of obesity interventions.
authors.affiliation: University of Houston, Department of Health and Human Performance, Houston, TX, USA. dhernandez26@uh.edu.
authors.forename: Daphne C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Hernandez
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001823:Body Composition / Q000502:physiology*; D015992:Body Mass Index; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005502:Food; D006630:Hispanic or Latino / Q000208:ethnology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009035:Mothers / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011203:Poverty / Q000208:ethnology*; D013781:Texas / Q000208:ethnology; D055105:Waist Circumference / Q000502:physiology*