One of the strengths of the concept of food security is the recognition that one may achieve adequate nutritional status (measured by anthropometry, for example) without being food secure...for example if households worry, struggle, engage in unacceptable practices in order to obtain sufficient food to avoid undernutrition.  If you don't have a food security measure, and anyone can agree that GAM is bad, why not use GAM to measure GAM and not worry about whether it represents food security.

Dear colleagues, in emergency setting it's valuable to look over all indicators potentially capable to give alert. That is applicable in remote area health system supporting, refugees response intervention and war setting. Not having any study to support my view, in practice there is a certain correlation between GAM figures and food security in those listed context. Simply because during those period of time,child and mother are among those who highly are affected by food security status. How far GAM could be a strong indicator of food security, let's look for structured evidence from litterature.