Food Consumption Pattern and Dietary Diversity of the FSNSP Covered Households

Content:

Acronyms

List of Tables

List of Figures

Chapter-1 Introduction

Chapter-2 Methodology

Chapter-3 Results

Chapter-4 Comparison with National Data

Chapter-5 Discussion

References

List of Tables

Table-1 : Per capita daily food intake of the households

Table-2 : Mean per capita daily intake of the nutrients of the households

Table-3 : Percentage of households using particular food groups

Table-4 : Percentage of households within different energy intake level

Table-5 : Percentage of households within threshold calorie consumption group

Table-6 : Comparison of per capita mean amount of food intake of the survey households with Household Income and Expenditure Survey

List of Titles

Title-1 : Contribution of food groups to energy and protein consumption daily per capita

Title-2 : Contribution of food groups to iron and calcium consumption daily per capita

Title-3 : Proportion of households achieving dietary diversity (six food groups)

Title-4 : Consumption (gram) of selected food groups of the survey households compared to the recommended intake for Bangladeshi individuals

Chapter-1: Introduction

The extent of hunger and food insecurity in a country is an imperative welfare indicator (Anand and Harris 1990). The Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations estimates around 800 million people worldwide to be food insecure and they are not retained in the boundary of the developing world. Measuring food insecurity at the individual/household level rather than national level differs from the more traditional approach of identifying food insecurity as the inadequacy of aggregated supply of and accessibility to food (Busch and Lacy 1984). Recently, however dissatisfaction with many of the available measures of food security has led to the use of direct measure of food insecurity (Maxwell 1995; Maxwell et al. 1999; Wolfe and Frongillo 2001) such as household food consumption data (based on recall). Household food consumption has been defined as the total amount of food available for consumption in the household, generally excluding the food taken outside unless prepared at home (Klaver, Knuiman et al. 1982). It serves as an indicator of food security as well as a distal proxy indicator for poverty. Information about food consumption and dietary diversity is important from the programmatic point of view as it has the potentiality to be used as effectively to detect change, modify, or improve programs activities (Jalal et al. 2009).

Today, food insecurity, and under-nutrition persist as the most serious and chronic public health problems facing Bangladesh. Emphasizing in the key areas of food security and nutrition, the government of Bangladesh has felt the need for a comprehensive, nationwide surveillance system. In response to this crucial need for accurate and timely surveillance data on nutrition and food security in Bangladesh, the European Commission (EC) funded the National Food Security Nutritional Surveillance Project (FSNSP). Food security and Nutrition Surveillance Project (FSNSP) is a collaborative follow up project of both Helen Keller International (HKI) and James P Grant Public Health School (JPG) of BRAC University. The central aim of the project is to measure household’s food diversity and food security in Bangladesh. Through this project data on socio-economic status, water, sanitation and hygiene, food availability and consumption pattern, morbidity pattern and immunization of children, information regarding reproduction and mother health were also collected.

Research and Evaluation Division (RED) was advanced as a multi-disciplinary sovereign research unit within the framework of BRAC. BRAC RED has also initiated a study with comparatively small sample size while the project of FSNSP was going on. The aim of the study conducted by BRAC RED was to test the validity of the food security and food diversity questionnaire used by FSNSP. This paper provides information about the consumption pattern and dietary diversity of the studied households using food frequency questionnaire. This paper also provides information of poverty among the studied households using per capita per day calorie consumption as a proxy indicator and the percentage of households with food insecurity.

Chapter-2: Methodology

1) Study Design:

The study, carried out by BRAC RED was cross sectional in design. It was a descriptive assessment of the dietary consumption pattern in Bangladesh. For the study we used a quantitative method to collect dietary information in a short period of time to fulfill the objectives of the study.

2) Site selection:

The study households were selected among the households that were selected by FSNSP project in the first round. FSNSP targeted to collect data from 61 districts out of 64 districts under 7 divisions of Bangladesh in two rounds (31 districts in first round and the remaining 30 districts in the second round). FSNSP excluded 3 districts of Chittagong hill tracts due to communication problem. For our study we had also excluded the Chittagong hill tracts and randomly select 18 districts out of the 31 districts in the first round of the FSNSP study.

3) Sample size of the study:

In the first round of the FSNSP project, a total of Seven hundred and twenty households were randomly selected from 18 districts in Bangladesh. Twenty households from each village were selected for the interview where FSNSP team selected 30 households from each village. Among the study samples 9 households were from those who provided incomplete and missing values hence these 9 samples were excluded from the analysis. Besides these, in baseline analysis 5 households had calorie consumption above 5000 kcal/capita/day were considered outliers (Wiesmann et al. 2009) and excluded from the subsequent analysis. So the sample size of the study was 706.