Down to Earth Nirasiya Bai’s three sons are used to their mother fainting every other week. Small pieces of shakkar (brown sugar) are now kept handy and placed swiftly under her tongue every time she is on the verge of collapsing. In March alone, three such incidents have occurred. The 52-year-old resident of Shivtarai village in Chattisgarh’s Bilaspur district is a diabetes patient. Nearly every other family in the village houses...
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Road to a malnutrition-free India -Bhavani RV
-The Hindu It’s imperative that ‘good nutrition’ becomes everyone’s mantra if we are serious about addressing the challenge Malnutrition continues to be a major challenge in India 75 years after independence and we need concerted action around it. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) report on Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 puts the number of undernourished people in India in 2019-21 at 224.3 million, i.e., 16% of a...
More »Is anaemia seen in three in 10 rural men due to iron deficiency? -R Prasad
-The Hindu Prevalence of anaemia among men in rural areas was lowest in the southern States (18.5%) and highest in the eastern region (34.1%) While anaemia among adolescent girls and boys, and women, particularly those of reproductive age has been studied extensively, anaemia in men has been largely ignored. In 2019, a paper published in The Lancet Global Health highlighted that nearly one in four men (23.2%) in the age group 15-54...
More »Reforming the PDS for better nutrition -Surabhi Mittal
-Hindustan Times India ranked 107th out of 121 assessed countries on the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI). Although there are some measurement issues in the GHI, the report says there is high malnutrition in India due to rice-wheat biased policies. Malnutrition in India manifests itself in terms of triple burden – underweight especially among poor, hidden hunger (deficiency in micronutrients), and Overweight. The National Food Security Act, 2013 (NFSA) was introduced to...
More »WHO report draws our attention to the human cost of non-communicable diseases
If you are not serious about non-communicable diseases, then this single piece of information is enough to scare you -- during 2019, almost two-third of deaths in India occurred due to such diseases i.e., NCDs. The newly released report by World Health Organization shows that out of the total deaths in 2019 in our country, about 28 percent were caused by cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), 10 percent by cancers, 12 percent by chronic...
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