Food is extremely important for any person to maintain healthy body and mind. You need to maintain balanced diet to stay healthy and to avoid diseases.
Your diet should contain number of nutrients, proteins and minerals which are required for the development of muscles and even help the body to heal and fight against infections and diseases.
Millions of people in Asian countries suffer with malnutrition. Malnutrition is when the body is in the stage of deficiency of nutrients which are needed for the proper functioning of our body.
It is estimated that 578 million people are suffering with malnutrition in Asian countries and most of them are children who are below 5 years. Malnutrition is the cause for many diseases and illness and may even leads to death sometimes.
Symptoms of Malnutrition:
Symptoms of under nutrients or malnutrition include:
- Tiredness and inability to work
- Unable to concentrate
- Loss of fat, muscle mass and tissues
- Lack of appetite
- Longer healing time for wounds
- High complications after surgery
In severe cases
- Breathing becomes difficult
- Skin becomes thin and pale
- Hair becomes dry and fall out easily
Eventually malnutrition leads to heart failure and respiratory failure and the children with malnutrition shows lack of growth and become more tired and irritable.
Causes of Malnutrition:
Malnutrition may result from many medical and environmental conditions. Some of them are shown below:
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Health problems:
Malnutrition leads to health issues like depression, nervosa bulimia which is nothing but eating disorder.
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Lack of Intake of Food:
Person who suffers from malnutrition lacks in intake of food, which may result in illness. For example a condition called dysphagia which may result in difficulty of swallowing food and contribute fitting dentures.
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Digestive Disorders:
If your body doesn’t absorb the required nutrients from the food, even a healthy diet may not prevent malnutrition. People may suffer with chronic diseases like celiac that means gluten intolerance, which ultimately result in damage of small intestine.
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High Consumption of Alcohol:
Addiction of alcohol or high consumption of alcohol leads to damage of pancreas and makes it hard to digest food and absorb nutrients which produces hormones and regulates metabolism.
Impact of Malnutrition
Malnutrition gives rise to severe socio economic effects which as follows:
Effects on Children:
Malnutrition effect more in children; children needs to get required nutrients and proteins for their optimal growth. If they lack in nutrition, this may lead to many health hazard such as poor immune system, micro nutrient deficiency, GI track infections and anemia.
Effects on Pregnant Women:
Pregnant women needs nutrition’s for her and her baby. If the women lack nutrition then it affects the health of her baby growing inside and she may also have difficult labor and postpartum hemorrhage.
General Effects:
Malnutrition in persons may result in weak immunity power and muscle becomes less active. Even the functioning of the kidneys becomes weak and impaired.
4 Types of Malnutrition and Their Effects:
As we all know malnutrition occurs due to nutrient deficiency, but don’t you know it also happens when we take excessive amount of nutrients? However there are two main malnutrition’s to be considered, one is growth failure malnutrition and the other is micronutrient malnutrition.
The types of malnutrition are shown below:
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Acute Malnutrition:
This is caused when there is a rapid weight loss in your body. Especially in children if they do not get required nutrients, they may face this malnutrition. Acute malnutrition is further categorized into following categories.
- Marasmus:
This happens due to degeneration of body fat and tissues to compensate for lack of nutrients in the body. This leads to slowing down of internal process of body including the functioning of immune system.
- Kwashiorkar:
This can be explained as bilateral pitting oedema which is nothing but fluid retention in legs and feet, which makes the under nourished child look plump.
- Marasmic Kwashorkar:
This is the combination of both marasmus and kwasiorkar that results in severe conditions of malnutrition.
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Growth Failure Malnutrition:
As the name suggest, this type of malnutrition leads to failure of growth, height and even weight according to age. A child is not developed according to his/her age, which makes them weak and unable to perform bodily functions effectively.
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Chronic Malnutrition or Stunting:
This happens over a long period of time and has long lasting consequences. It starts before the baby is born, because of poor nutrients and poor health of mother during pregnancy.
This leads to stunted growt and results is less weight and size of the baby. The main cause for stunted malnutrition is poor breast feeding, lack of proper nutrients and infections.
It is a serious concern because after certain age it becomes irreversible. Therefore it is important to provide basic nutrients at early stage by giving proper medical treatments to pregnant ladies and young girls.
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Micro nutrient Malnutrition:
This specifically happens due to lack of vitamins such as Vitamin A, B, C and D, B12, B9, Selenium, calcium, iron, iodine, zinc and folate. These vitamins are very essential for maintaining healthy body, if you lack in these vitamins, it will make you undernourished.
- Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets and bone disorders.
- Iodine deficiency causes mental retardation and also leads to impair of thyroid functions.
- Iron deficiency causes poor brain development, anemia and poor cardiac functioning.
- Deficiency of Vitamin A causes poor vision and poor development of bones.
- Even selenium deficiency leads to poor cardiac functioning, weak immunity and osteoarthritis.
- Zinc deficiency acauses poor immunity, anemia and sensory perception.
- You experience slow growth and anemia if you lack in vitamin B9.
- Nerve degeneration and poor red blood cell formation is caused due to the deficiency of vitamin B12.