Malnutrition

A brief guide to malnutrition and its impact globally and in Bangladesh.

Globally…

• Malnutrition — including obesity, overweight, and underweight — affects more than 2 billion people in the world.¹
• 45% of deaths of children under five years of age are linked to under-nutrition.
• In 2020, around 150 million children under five years of age worldwide were affected by stunting.²
• In 2019, vitamin A deficiency and zinc deficiency caused around 23,800 deaths³ and 2810 deaths⁴ of children under five years of age, respectively.

In Bangladesh…

• 35% of the population remains food insecure.⁵
• Severe acute malnutrition affects 600,000 children.⁶
• Anaemia affects 43% of children from six months to five years of age.⁷
• 28% of children under five years of age are stunted.⁵
• 10 % of children under five years of age are wasted.
• 23% of children under five years of age are underweight.
• A third of ever-married women are underweight and around 13% have short stature, which increases the risk of difficult childbirth and low-birth-weight infants.⁸
• Around half of all women suffer from anaemia, mostly nutritional in origin.⁹
• Malnutrition is estimated to cost Bangladesh more than US$1bn every year in lost productivity.¹⁰

Definitions…

Stunting: abnormally low height-for-age.
Wasting: abnormally low weight-for-height.
Underweight: abnormally low weight-for-age.

Sources

1.     https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malnutrition

2.     https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/

3.     https://www.healthdata.org/results/gbd_summaries/2019/vitamin-a-deficiency-level-3-risk

4.     https://www.healthdata.org/results/gbd_summaries/2019/zinc-deficiency-level-3-risk

5.     https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Copy_of_tagged_Bangladesh-Nutrition-Profile.pdf

6.     https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/156482651403500214

7.     https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.ANM.CHLD.ZS?locations=BD

8.     https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8262449/

9.     https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(22)00084-5/fulltext

10.  https://www.wfp.org/publications/food-and-nutrition-security-bangladesh