Background: Food insecurity refers to the lack of sufficient and safe availability of the food necessary for a healthy and active life. Intelligence is the general talent of a person for understanding the world and meeting his/ her expectations. Many studies have suggested anassociation between a person’s nutrition and his/her mental abilities and intelligence quotient.Methods: The current research was a case-control in which 222 female students aged 9-11 years (111 with low intelligence quotients as the case group and 111 with average intelligence quotients as the control group) were randomly chosen from public girls primary schools in Bandar Anzali, Iran. General and demographic characteristics were gathered, and USDA household food insecurity questionnaires were completed by the students mothers. Wechslers revised intelligence test was used to determine each student’s intelligence quotient. The acquired data was analyzed in chi-square 2, student ttest, SPSS (16.0 version), and Stata 11 SE.Findings: The rate of food insecurity in this study was 51%. Food insecurity was found to have a significant association to the students intelligence quotients (p>0.0001). Food insecurity in case and control group households were 58.6% and 22.5%, respectively, and the average intelligence quotient was 77.97±5.56 for students in the case group and 94.6±5.47 for children in the control group. Furthermore, the association between food insecurity and mothers employment, parents educational levels, household economic level, and number of employed household members were also found to be statistically significant.conclusion: The association between food insecurity and students intelligence quotients was completely significant (p<0.0001), and the rate of food insecurity in case group households was 2.6 times more than of control group households. Therefore, it is necessary to pay more attention to household food security and its consequences, including childrens low intelligence quotients.