Feb 6, 2020
In this week’s podcast we talk about food insecurity in older adults with UCSF’s Hilary Seligman, MD. Hilary has done pioneering work in this area. Some of this work was funded by Archstone Foundation (full disclosure: Archstone is a GeriPal funder). Hilary's expertise runs the gamut from federal nutrition programs (including SNAP), food banking and the charitable feeding network, hunger policy, food affordability and access, and income-related drivers of food choice. I have a confession. I knew almost nothing about food insecurity before this podcast. Is it hunger? Why should we think about food insecurity and health in the same sentence? Why is this an issue for older adults in particular? I was absolutely blown away by what I learned in this podcast. I have since quoted Hilary Seligman 4 or 5 times in other meetings. Food insecurity is one of those topics that people don’t talk about but is likely far more critical to the health and well-being of the people we care about than other topics we spends gobs of time and money on (e.g. cholinesterase inhibitors for dementia). So take a listen and if you want to take a deeper dive in some of the topics we talked about, check out the links for this blog post at http://bit.ly/2vbEEZE or geripal.org. Enjoy! -@AlexSmithMD