The National Institute of Nutrition had also found that the intake of green leafy vegetables, milk and milk products, and sugar and jaggery was lower than the level recommended by the Indian Council of Medical Research.Only half of the population within the 1–3-year-old bracket (56%), two-thirds (68%) of the population of 4–6-year-old children, and half of the population of pregnant women (56%) were consuming adequate amounts of protein and calories.As per the NFHS-4, 42% of mother-initiated breast feeding occurred within the first hour of delivery; and one-fourth of the mothers fed infants prelacteal feeds like honey, glucose or sugar water, or goat milk immediately after birth. The prevalence of hypertension was found to be 31% among urbanmen and 26% for women, being highest in Kerala (31%–39%) and lowest in Bihar (16%–22%).Alongside undernutrition, overweight and obesity are also emerging rapidly in India, creating this double burden of overnutrition and undernutrition. Childhood obesity is becoming an issue even among the urban poor, with childhood obesity as a known precursor to obesity and other NCDs in adulthood.With 14.4 million obese children, India has the second highest number of obese children in the world, next to the People’s Republic of China. Childhood obesity is likely to be a serious public health problem in India, especially in the urban population, the paper warned.Overnutrition is worse among the adults. Some 31.3% of women and 26.6% of men are overweight or obese in the urban areas. A growing adult obesity among the urban poor along with comorbidities either diabetes or hypertension, require lifestyle changes and appropriate nutrition.This requires programmes designed in a rational and scientific way by experienced social scientists who must be recruited under the NUHM, and coordination between the nutrition program and NCD control programs.There is a clear urgency of addressing malnutrition in urban areas which is accentuated by the fact that non-communicable diseases are on the rise. The paper mentions poor infrastructure, fragmented and uncoordinated health service delivery system, suboptimal financing, lack of coordination among stakeholders and agencies, pavement dwellers and migrant population, paucity of human resources, unequal distribution of resources etc as the major challenge in effectively tackling the problem.The challenges in the context of nutrition programmes included absence of well-defined target areas, poor work and living conditions, exclusion of urban poor from accessing quality services like nutrition, health, water, sanitation, education and protection, food insecurity and poor diets, and lack of financial protection.(IPA Service)Views are personal
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