Evaluation indicators of Food and Nutritional Insecurity and associated factors: systematic review

The scope of this paper was to systematically investigate the indicators used in the evaluation of food and nutritional insecurity and associated factors in Brazilian studies. After selection in the databases using search terms and reverse search, 89 articles were included. The majority of the articles evaluated food and nutritional insecurity according to the indicator of perception, using the Brazilian Scale of Food Insecurity (83.1%), the American Scale (5.62%) and isolated questions (2.25%). The other articles evaluated the presence of malnutrition among children (1.12%), expenditure on food (1.12%), adult-equivalent dietary intake (1.12%), protocols (2.25%), and prediction models (2.25%). Food and nutritional insecurity (measured by the different indicators) was associated with socioeconomic and demographic factors, health and lifestyle conditions, food consumption and nutritional status, based on families, specific age groups, beneficiaries of government programs, among others, as sample units. The majority of the studies merely evaluated the food dimension of the insecurity, thereby increasing the difficulty in evaluating this complex situation.