Qualidade da dieta de mulheres em vulnerabilidade social e sua relação com a insegurança alimentar

Abstract

The adoption of healthy practices can directly affect patterns of illness and healthy eating is part of these practices. One of the factors that can lead to a lower quality diet is food insecurity, which mainly affects populations in social vulnerability. To assess the quality of food and food insecurity in Brazil, there are some indices, among them, the Brazilian Scale of Insecurity and the Healthy Eating Index adapted for the Brazilian population. This study aimed to evaluate the quality of the diet, through the adapted healthy eating index of women living in a situation of social vulnerability in the city of Maceió-Alagoas and to verify its association with food and nutritional insecurity. This is a cross-sectional, population-based study, carried out between October 2020 and May 2021, with women aged between 20 and 44 years in social vulnerability. To investigate the food security situation, the Brazilian Food Insecurity Scale was used, to investigate food consumption, the 24-hour recall was applied and to assess the quality of the diet, the Healthy Eating Index was used. In the crude regression analysis, diet quality was associated with food insecurity (β: -0.15; 95%CI: -5.05; -0.77) (Table 5). It was observed that 567 (74.6%) of the women presented some level of food insecurity and with regard to the quality of the diet, only 11 (1.4%) of the women had a good quality. In the regression analysis adjusted for the variables age, race, years of schooling, marital status, beneficiary of a cash transfer program and per capita income, it was possible to observe that the quality of the diet remained associated with the presence of AI (β: -2 .91; 95%CI: -4.65; -0.18). Considering FI as a problem of serious population significance and socioeconomic connotation, it is emphasized that social and political accountability in the different spheres of government must lead to the implementation of intersectoral measures focused on the groups most vulnerable to the violation of the right to adequate food.