Pediatricians from Boston Medical Center are warning that cuts to the nation’s food stamp program would endanger childrens’ long-term health.

“SNAP acts as a vaccine against food insecurity and hunger,” lead author Deborah Frank, MD, Director of the Grow Clinic for Children at BMC wrote in a commentary in last week’s issue of Lancet. “Our research consortium, Children’s HealthWatch, has for more than a decade accumulated data on the impacts of food insecurity and interventions to decrease food insecurity among low-income babies and young children.”

Families with young children are at highest risk of food insecurity, Frank and her colleagues found.

A measure approved in the Republican-led House of Representatives would cut 3.8 million low-income people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2014 and an average of nearly 3 million people each year over the next decade.