The experience of food insecurity is a unique one, and often looks different for each individual or their family. It is, therefore, hard to encapsulate this reality in a single definition. However, broadly speaking, being unsure whether you can secure sufficient food or being unsure of its quality is reflective of food insecurity (also sometimes referred to as food poverty). As such, food insecurity is a social determinant of health (Campanera et al., 2023).
As of 2025, roughly 14% of households in the UK are affected by food insecurity (The Food Foundation, 2025). This is reflective a growing problem, with rising living costs and an increased reliance on food banks highlighting the urgent need to increase our understanding of the impacts of food insecurity and how we might mitigate it. Over time, researchers have explored various ways that food insecurity can impact people’s lives, both across the short-term and the long-term. Previous research has suggested that adults experiencing food insecurity are more likely to report binge eating and compensatory behaviours (Abene et al., 2023; Hazzard et al., 2020), making it especially important to explore how we can act early, such as supporting people in their formative years.
Such findings are nudging researchers toward an important question: how does growing up in a food-insecure home affect a child’s later relationship with food? Trompeter and colleagues (2025) have sought to answer this question in this longitudinal cohort study, using data from pregnancy through to adulthood.
Food insecurity affects families across the UK, and can have both short-term and long-term impacts.
Methods
In their study, Trompeter et al. (2025) analysed data from more than 6,700 children in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK birth cohort tracking families from pregnancy onwards.
Mothers were asked to report how difficult it was to afford food from pregnancy until their children were 7 years old, allowing researchers to identify four trajectories of food insecurity that children experienced.
Adolescents then later self-reported binge eating and compensatory behaviours at the ages of 14, 16, and 18.
Using this data, the authors examined the relationship between these four trajectories and disordered eating, accounting for factors that could affect their findings (e.g., familial socioeconomic factors, parental mental health, ethnicity, sex, childhood BMI).
Results
The authors identified four trajectories of food insecurity:
- No food insecurity (consistently able to afford food)
- Low food insecurity (occasional or mild difficulty affording food)
- Time-limited food insecurity (notable difficulties early on that improved by around age 5)
- Persistent food insecurity (ongoing difficulty affording food across childhood, up to the age of 7)
Roughly a quarter of children in this cohort experienced some level of food insecurity in childhood:
- low food insecurity was most common (12%; n = 416),
- followed by time-limited food insecurity (6%; n = 292) and
- persistent food insecurity (4%; n = 214).
The majority of children fell into the no food insecurity group (78%; n = 5,801).
Compared with other groups, children exposed to persistent food insecurity tended to have a higher BMI by around age nine, and their parents were more likely to report depression, anxiety, and lower educational attainment.
Disordered eating was relatively common and increased with age:
- At age 14, 6.4% of adolescents reported binge eating in the past year, while around 14% reported at least one compensatory behaviour such as fasting, purging, or excessive exercise.
- By age 16, prevalence had roughly doubled, with 12.7% reporting binge eating and 27.8% reporting compensatory behaviours.
- At age 18, binge eating rose further to 18.5%, whereas compensatory behaviours remained relatively stable at 26.7%.
Children who experienced time-limited or persistent food insecurity had higher odds of certain disordered-eating behaviours, even after adjusting for confounding factors.
- At age 14, adolescents exposed to time-limited food insecurity had 63% higher odds of binge eating (OR = 1.63, 95% CI [1.02 to 2.61], p = 0.040),
- while those in the persistent group had 72% higher odds of compensatory behaviours (OR = 1.72, 95% CI [1.07 to 2.78], p = 0.025).
- Low food insecurity was not significantly different from no food insecurity.
At age 16, none of the food-insecurity trajectories showed statistically significant associations with binge eating or any compensatory behaviours. The authors suggest that wide confidence intervals, particularly in the smaller persistent group, indicate limited statistical power.
By age 18, time-limited food insecurity was again associated with higher odds of compensatory behaviours (OR = 1.68, 95% CI [1.02 to 2.75], p = 0.041). Although persistent insecurity showed elevated odds ratios for both outcomes, confidence intervals crossed the null, making the findings inconclusive.
In this cohort of 6,700 participants, from the ages of 14 to 18, disordered eating became more common among children who had experienced food insecurity in childhood.
Conclusion
This study adds to a growing body of work showing that food insecurity may also shape how young people relate to food and their bodies in the long term. In this UK birth cohort, about one in four children experienced some level of food insecurity in early childhood. Those with time‑limited or persistent food insecurity had higher odds of binge eating and/or compensatory behaviours in their teens, particularly at ages 14 and 18. This pattern mirrors earlier research suggesting that binge-eating symptoms often intensify across adolescence, while compensatory behaviours may emerge earlier.
Moreover, early childhood appears to be a sensitive window for shaping future relationships with food; even when food insecurity resolved by school age, an elevated risk of disordered eating remained. Reducing child food insecurity and supporting families around mealtimes could be an important part of preventing symptoms of disordered eating.
Tackling child food insecurity is also an investment in young people’s long‑term mental health and relationship with food.
Strengths and limitations
A key strength of this study is the use of the large, long-running ALSPAC cohort, which followed families from pregnancy through to late adolescence and collected information at several stages of development. Data were collected over time, allowing researchers to examine childhood food insecurity as it unfolded rather than relying on later memories. This design can reduce recall bias and strengthen what we can infer about how early food insecurity may contribute to later disordered eating, and at what point in one’s life it may exert an effect. Mothers reported how difficult it was to afford food on six occasions between pregnancy and age seven, allowing the authors to organically identify the patterns of food insecurity described earlier.
In their analyses, the authors accounted for a range of important background factors, including parental education, parental depression and anxiety, and child BMI, while missing data were addressed using multiple imputation. This strengthens our confidence that the associations the authors found reflect food insecurity itself, rather than background differences between families or biases caused by missing data. Combined, this approach provides rare longitudinal UK evidence linking early food insecurity with later binge eating and compensatory behaviours.
However, several contextual and methodological limitations are also worth noting. Participants were born in 1991–1992 and experienced food insecurity in the social and economic climate of the 1990s UK, when supports such as food banks and school breakfast programmes were less common. This means the findings may not fully reflect the experiences of families today. The ALSPAC sample was also somewhat more advantaged than the UK average and drawn from a single region, which may limit how widely the results apply.
In addition, disordered eating behaviours were self-reported by adolescents, which introduces the possibility of recall bias and social desirability bias (where reporting may be skewed by a desire to align answers with what is deemed more socially acceptable). Attrition over time is another concern, and as noted by the authors, families facing greater disadvantage were more likely to drop out, potentially leading to underestimates of socioeconomic effects.
The study is based on data collected in the 1990s, when UK policies, welfare provision, and supports such as food banks and school meal programs looked quite different from today.
Implications for practice
Food insecurity is unlikely to influence eating in just one way; instead, researchers point to a web of interacting biological, psychological, and social mechanisms.
One prominent hypothesis is the ‘feast‑or‑famine’ cycle (Hazzard et al. 2023). When access to food is unpredictable, people may overeat when food is available, overriding internal hunger and fullness cues and fostering binge-like eating. Early childhood is a sensitive window for the development of life-long habits, and such patterns can lay a foundation for behaviours that may later evolve into emotional eating and loss of control. Moreover, research shows that in households experiencing food insecurity, parents tend to report more restrictive feeding practices and higher rates of their own disordered eating (Loth et al. 2025). This may model unhealthy attitudes towards food for children. People experiencing food insecurity also tend to experience more stress and mental health difficulties, which are independently linked to disordered eating (Tan et al. 2023). Finally, food insecurity is linked with higher child BMI, and higher weight in turn predicts dieting and unhealthy weight‑control behaviours in adolescence (Shonkoff et al. 2025; Neumark-Sztainer et al. 2012, offering a plausible bridge from early scarcity to later compensatory behaviours such as fasting, purging, or excessive exercise.
Findings from Trompeter et al. (2025) strengthen the existing literature showing strong links between food insecurity and both mental health problems and eating disorder symptoms, underscoring that access to food should not be viewed solely through the lens of economics. This furthers the rationale for tackling food insecurity as part of mental‑health and eating‑disorder prevention strategies.
For clinical practice, this challenges existing associations between higher levels of disordered eating and higher socioeconomic status (Huryk et al. 2021) and can be translated into meaningful guidelines encouraging routine screening for food insecurity in both eating disorder and general mental health settings. Equally, interventions that address food insecurity should also explicitly tackle eating disorder risk (e.g., by incorporating family‑meal support and psychoeducation). This is critical for early intervention.
Policy-wise, the ALSPAC trajectories point to the need for early, structural supports – adequate family income, free school meals, and protection from sharp swings in food availability. In England, initiatives such as the Healthy Start Scheme (2006), the Holiday Activities and Food programme (2018), Universal Infant Free School Meals (2014), and the School Food Standards (2015) aim to address some of these factors (Department of Education 2019, 2025a, 2025b). Compared to the 1990’s context, these schemes have expanded both access to and the range of meals, with future plans aiming to extend support to a larger population (Department of Education, 2025c).
Initiatives in the UK like Free School Meals aim to expand support to reduce the impacts of food insecurity.
Statement of interests
Ghufran Al Sayed has no conflicts of interest to declare.
Edited by
Dr Nina Higson-Sweeney.
Links
Primary paper
Nora Trompeter, Marie-Christine Opitz, Francisco Diego Rabelo-da-Ponte, Helen Sharpe, Sylvane Desrivieres, Ulrike Schmidt, & Nadia Micali. (2025). Childhood food insecurity trajectories and adolescent eating disorder symptoms: a UK cohort study. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-025-03022-y
Other references
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Department for Education (2019). School food standards: resources for schools. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-food-standards-resources-for-schools
Department for Education (2025a). Holiday activities and food programme 2025. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/holiday-activities-and-food-programme/holiday-activities-and-food-programme-2025
Department for Education (2025b). Universal infant free school meals (UIFSM): 2025 to 2026. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-infant-free-school-meals-uifsm-2025-to-2026.
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