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Amrita Neupane
Health 1020
Paul Roberts
Research Paper on Malnutrition

Malnutrition
individual

health

is

referred

and

as

well-being

the

measurable

causing

from

weakening

to

insufficient

or

imbalanced diet comparative to physiological needs. It is also referred

to the subjective feeling of uneasy resulted by lack of food, food
insecurity for example lack of access to nutritionally insufficient food in
a socially acknowledged manner. Sometimes the nation or region lacks
food and people suffer from famine. The food shortage occurs when
there is either war, draught or technological problem in the farming.
In the most developed countries like US not even have 100%
food secure. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO) and the World Bank, working from national food production and
trade statistics along with household income estimated that some 800
million people in the developing countries are food insecure. FAO and
World

Bank

stated,

the

largest

proportions

of

food

insecure

households and undernourished children exist in South Asia, where

endemic poverty is high; numbers are growing also in sub-Saharan
Africa, where political instability and HIV-AIDS interfere with food
production, marketing, income generation and intergenerational care.

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The research paper on Malnutrition also states that within

households, lactating women, adolescent girls, pregnant females,
infants and young children and adults are vulnerable to malnutrition
where they had suffered intra-household discrimination in access to
food and care associated to their nutritional needs. This situation of
vulnerability is supplemental raised by extreme burden of workloads,
infections, malabsorption syndromes, environmental contamination,
and inadequate health services. The research further says that public
health nutritionists study nutrition over the life cycle, beginning with
gestational nutrition and breastfeeding, to identify these culturally
specific age and gender related patterns of malnourishment and to
institute more effective food and nutrition policies and practices.

According to the research paper, undernutrition includes both

protein-calorie malnutrition and specific micronutrient deficiencies.
Manifestations include growth failure in children, underweight and
weight loss in elders, extra burdens of diseases, and functional
impairments

to

physical

activities, work

performance,

cognitive

abilities, reproductive outcomes and social life.

From the 1930s through the late 1960s, nutritionists working with the
FAO, the World Health Organization and the United Nations University
made prevention of protein deficiency the priority for interventions. In

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the 1970s emphasis shifted to energy on the reasoning that if
nutritionally deprived children could get sufficient quantities of their
traditional balanced diet, protein would take care of itself. This
nutritional improvement through the initiatives probably improved the
lives of the malnourished children and reduced the risk of increasing
malnutrition. The research further revealed that the agricultural
intensification agenda of the green revolution was emphasized on
producing heaps of food cereals such as rice, wheat, maize in Asia and
Latin America but diminishing protein-balanced cereal legume crops
mixed. The long term national economic growth and development
became a part of integrated national nutrition and rural development
strategies. These strategies were promoted by the World Bank and
other foreign agencies that launched national material child-health
and school feeding programs. They addressed poverty alleviation and
malnutrition.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s priorities and framing shifted yet
again, this time to ending "hidden hunger." With UNICEF taking the
lead, the World Summit for Children (WSC) in 1990 set goals to
reduce--by half-- mild to moderate energy-protein malnutrition, which
had been implicated in more than half of child deaths in the developing
world, and virtual elimination of vitamin A, iodine, and iron deficiencies
as public health problems. The diseases like beriberi, pellagra,

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kwashiorkor, rickets, and scurvy were eliminated by the dietary
diversification.
The World Summit for Children (WSC) emphasized on ending vitamin A
deficiency blindness and impaired immune response, cretinism and
goiter anemias. Simultaneously WSC developed a goal to correct more
moderate deficiencies, which researchers showed could depress
physical and intellectual development, quality work performance and
child survival.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
DeRose, Laurie, Ellen Messer, and Sara Millman, eds. 1998. Who's
Hungry? And How Do We Know? Food Shortage, Poverty, and
Deprivation. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.
Food and Agricultural Organization. 2011. State of Food Insecurity in
the World.
Runge, C. Ford, Benjamin Senauer, Philip G. Pardey, and Mark W.
Rosegrant. 2003. Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Food Security and
Globalization. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
World Health Organization. 2007. Global Database on Child Growth and
Malnutrition.