---
title: "Human nutrition"
chunk: 10/20
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nutrition"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:55:25.210940+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== South Asia ===
South Asia has the highest percentage and number of underweight children under five in the world, at approximately 78 million children. Patterns of stunting and wasting are similar, where 44% have not reached optimal height and 15% are wasted, rates much higher than any other regions. This region of the world has extremely high rates of underweight children. According to a 2006 UNICEF study, 46% of its child population under five is underweight. The same study indicates India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan combined account for half the globe's underweight child population. South Asian nations have made progress towards the MDGs, considering the rate has decreased from 53% since 1990, however, a 1.7% decrease of underweight prevalence per year will not be sufficient to meet the 2015 goal. Some nations, such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, on the other hand, have made significant improvements, all decreasing their prevalence by half in ten years. While India and Pakistan have made modest improvements, Nepal has made no significant improvement in underweight child prevalence. Other forms of undernutrition have continued to persist with high resistance to improvement, such as the prevalence of stunting and wasting, which has not changed significantly in the past 10 years. Causes of this poor nutrition include energy-insufficient diets, poor sanitation conditions, and the gender disparities in educational and social status. Girls and women face discrimination especially in nutrition status, where South Asia is the only region in the world where girls are more likely to be underweight than boys. In South Asia, 60% of children in the lowest quintile are underweight, compared to only 26% in the highest quintile, and the rate of reduction of underweight is slower amongst the poorest.

=== Eastern and Southern Africa ===
The Eastern and Southern African nations have shown no improvement since 1990 in the rate of underweight children under five. They have also made no progress in halving hunger by 2015, the most prevalent Millennium Development Goal. This is due primarily to the prevalence of famine, declined agricultural productivity, food emergencies, drought, conflict, and increased poverty. This, along with HIV/AIDS, has inhibited the nutrition development of nations such as Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Botswana has made remarkable achievements in reducing underweight prevalence, dropping 4% in 4 years, despite its place as the second leader in HIV prevalence amongst adults in the globe. South Africa, the wealthiest nation in this region, has the second-lowest proportion of underweight children at 12%, but has been steadily increasing in underweight prevalence since 1995. Almost half of Ethiopian children are underweight, and along with Nigeria, they account for almost one-third of the underweight under five in all of Sub-Saharan Africa.

=== West and Central Africa ===
West and Central Africa has the highest rate of children under five underweight in the world. Of the countries in this region, the Congo has the lowest rate at 14%, while the nations of Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo are improving slowly. In Gambia, rates decreased from 26% to 17% in four years, and their coverage of vitamin A supplementation reaches 91% of vulnerable populations. This region has the next highest proportion of wasted children, with 10% of the population under five not at optimal weight. Little improvement has been made between the years of 1990 and 2004 in reducing the rates of underweight children under five, whose rate stayed approximately the same. Sierra Leone has the highest child under five mortality rate in the world, due predominantly to its extreme infant mortality rate, at 238 deaths per 1000 live births. Other contributing factors include the high rate of low birthweight children (23%) and low levels of exclusive breast feeding (4%). Anemia is prevalent in these nations, with unacceptable rates of iron deficient anemia. The nutritional status of children is further indicated by its high (10%) rate of child wasting. Wasting is a significant problem in Sahelian countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger – where rates fall between 11% and 19% of under fives, affecting more than 1 million children.
In Mali, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Aga Khan Foundation trained women's groups to make equinut, a healthy and nutritional version of the traditional recipe di-dèguè (comprising peanut paste, honey and millet or rice flour). The aim was to boost nutrition and livelihoods by producing a product that women could make and sell, and which would be accepted by the local community because of its local heritage.

=== Middle East and North Africa ===
Six countries in the Middle East and North Africa region are on target to meet goals for reducing underweight children by 2015, and 12 countries have prevalence rates below 10%. However, the nutrition of children in the region as a whole has degraded for the past ten years due to the increasing portion of underweight children in three populous nations – Iraq, Sudan, and Yemen. Forty six percent of all children in Yemen are underweight, a percentage that has worsened by 4% since 1990. In Yemen, 53% of children under five are stunted and 32% are born at low birth weight. Sudan has an underweight prevalence of 41%, and the highest proportion of wasted children in the region at 16%. One percent of households in Sudan consume iodized salt. Iraq has also seen an increase in child underweight since 1990. Djibouti, Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Oman, the Syrian Arab Republic and Tunisia are all projected to meet minimum nutrition goals, with OPT, Syrian AR, and Tunisia the fastest improving regions. This region demonstrates that undernutrition does not always improve with economic prosperity, where the United Arab Emirates, for example, despite being a wealthy nation, has similar child death rates due to malnutrition to those seen in Yemen.