Abstracts from the WORLD CONFERENCE ON VIRTUAL REHABILITATION 25 & 26 JUNE 2026 CORK, IRELAND.

Food security is defined as ‘’ (FAO, ). The absence of food security is therefore characterized by uncertainty about whether one will be able to access food of adequate quality and quantity in ways that are socially acceptable (Nord, ). In the United Kingdom (UK), an estimated 9.3 million adults, or 17.7% of UK households, experience food insecurity (The Food Foundation, ). Since the early 2010s, scholars in the UK have been alerting of the link between austerity measures and food insecurity reaching epidemic proportions (Taylor-Robinson , ; Garthwaite, Collins and Bambra, ). The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the recent unprecedented rise in the cost of living in the UK, has exacerbated food insecurity further. This is particularly true for poorest households, who, on average, spend a larger proportion of their income on essential commodities, such as energy and food (Limb, ). Not only is food insecurity a matter of social concern but it is also a public health issue given that it has been widely associated with adverse health outcomes, including undernutrition, obesity, and poor mental health (Swinburn , ; Jones, ). In the UK, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies prior to the cost of living crisis suggest that food insecurity is strongly associated with socio-economic status, education level, and receipt of benefits (Tingay , ; Pilgrim , ; Power , ; Loopstra, Reeves and Tarasuk, ). Most of the UK research on food insecurity has also focused on people accessing formal food banks, where a referral is required to receive assistance (Garthwaite, Collins and Bambra, ). There is a paucity of evidence on the network of other support systems that exist in the UK, which do not require proven need to be accessed. People accessing food support via these other means remain invisible to policymakers, as they are not counted in official figures of food bank users, and their experiences are not included in discussions around social protection mechanisms and food poverty. Moreover, it remains unknown how individuals who find themselves in this position negotiate cost allocation between other household expenditures and food, nor how such trade-offs may link to perceived health outcomes. Understanding how individuals navigate the experience of economic insecurity as it relates to food choices and health (both mental and physical), especially when they are seeking support outside of formal networks, is crucial to devising better policies that promote health and well-being. Currently, there is no international consensus on how food insecurity should be measured (Lambie-Mumford and Dowler, ). Historically, food insecurity has been measured through quantitative methods by economists, where the focus was on supply and demand at the national level and on energetic sufficiency for individuals (Habicht , ). In the last two decades, the use of ‘experience-based scales’, which measure individual perceptions of one’s food situation, has become widely adopted (Piperata and Dufour, ). This approach represents an advance in capturing different levels of food insecurity and, to some extent, variations in nutritional quality. However, these are blind to most coping mechanisms that occur within households, such as decision-making around acquisition, food preparation, and allocation (Piperata and Dufour, ). For example, these scales do not capture variability in eating times, which has been highlighted as potentially a key driver of the relationship between food insecurity and obesity (Nettle and Bateson, ). These topics therefore remain understudied, yet are key to understand the mechanisms linking food insecurity and health outcomes. There has also been no methodological consistency in the tracking of food insecurity prevalence in the UK, which makes it challenging to monitor rates at the national level (Pool and Dooris, ). Charities in the UK have advocated for the adoption of the FAO’s Food Insecurity Experience Based Scale (FIES) to harmonize these data and generate internationally comparable figures (Food Foundation, Sustain, and Oxford University, ).