Public health initiatives focused on nutrition and aimed at people in vulnerable situations—such as those under the National Nutrition and Health Program (PNNS) and the Food and Integration Plan (PAI)—have been implemented to improve the health status of these populations. Understanding the nutritional status of people in precarious situations allows for the adjustment of such intervention programs by identifying priority needs and evaluating the effectiveness of the measures implemented. Since it is difficult to address the entire population of people in precarious situations, a first possible approach to describing their nutritional status was to measure markers of nutritional status among people receiving food assistance. This was the focus of the Abena study, one of whose objectives was to describe the nutritional status of people relying on food assistance in four urban areas of metropolitan France. The initial available results are presented in this article. (Excerpt from the introduction)