Diets Sans Diversity

Ensuring a diverse diet for all and not fortification of staples with chemicals should be the public policy objective to ensure that children do not go malnourished.

- Vandana Prasad And Dipa Sinha

ONE OF THE STARKEST FINDINGS OF THE recently released data of the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (2016-18) (CNNS) is that only 6 per cent of the children in the 6-23 months age group received what is defined as a “minimum acceptable diet” in accordance with World Health Organisation (WHO) norms. However, this information is not entirely new. The National Family Health Survey-4 (2015) had alerted us to this issue not too long ago, has found that only about 9.6 per cent of the children in the 6-23 months age group were fed the minimum acceptable diet. (The minimum acceptable diet indicator measures both the minimum meal frequency and the minimum dietary diversity, that is, food from four or more food groups.)

While the data for young children are particularly disheartening, dietary diversity is of major concern for all age groups. For instance, among two- to four-year-old children, only about 32 per cent consumed any legumes and nuts in the previous 24 hours; 16 per cent consumed eggs; 19 per cent any flesh food. Sixty-two per cent had consumed dairy products and 56 per cent vitamin-A-rich fruits and vegetables. Among five- to nine-year-old children, about 35 per cent had an egg at least once a week, and fewer than 40 per cent had fruits at least once a week. The data for 10- to 19-year-old adolescents tell a similar story. Food frequency questionnaires typically do not deal with quantity. Thus these data are likely to be concealing even higher levels of dietary deprivation.

Broken down, what this essentially means, in simple terms, is that despite the supposed attention paid to food and hunger, very few receive food that has the minimum quality considered decent for human life and health. This seems to be reinforced also by the fact that India ranks 102 in the Global Hunger Index in 2019, out of a total of 117, and is the lowest-ranking country in the South Asian region.

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