Diet diversity, malnutrition and health: Evidence from Kenya

Abstract

We investigate the effects of diet diversity on health outcomes indicated by the body-mass index (BMI) of Kenyan women in their reproductive age (15-49 years). We estimate the demand for diet diversity (which is a proxy for diet quality) and analyse its relationship with BMI by allowing the effect of diet diversity to vary along the conditional BMI distribution. Results show that diet diversity is associated with a beneficial effect on the lower and upper tails of the BMI distribution, that is, dietary diversity improves BMI for underweight individuals while, at the same time, it reduces BMI for overweight/obese individuals. Specifically, doubling the diet diversity is associated with a 14.7% increase in BMI for underweight women and a 7.0% reduction in BMI of obese women. These results support the hypothesis that diet diversity is associated with optimal BMI and, thus, better health, contributing to the policy discourse concerning the double burden of malnutrition in developing countries.

Does nutrition knowledge training improve dietary diversity and nutrition intake? Insights from rural China

“…The selection of control variables is drawn upon existing literature related to nutrition knowledge programs (e.g., Davidson et al, 2021;Hou et al, 2021;Mwale et al, 2022) and household food consumption and nutrition intake (e.g., Korir et al, 2023;Ma et al, 2022aMa et al, , 2022bQin et al, 2023). Specifically, the selected control variables capture respondents' characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education level, and health knowledge), household-level characteristics (household size, children ratio, and asset ownership), and villagelevel characteristics (e.g., income level, number of food stores, express service outlet, ICT facility and distance to the food market).…”

“…Concisely, a higher dietary diversity core signified a diversified diet pattern. Dietary diversity captures the diet quality by evaluating the diversification of food consumption over a given period (Korir et al, 2023). In practice, it is hard for respondents to recall the details of meals consumed in the past 3 consecutive days (i.e., 72 h).…”