Low dietary diversity and its influencing factors among a San group in Namibia

Abstract

Objective Although the San in Namibia have been targeted by intensive development efforts, there is little knowledge available about San diet quality and nutritional status. The objective of this study is therefore to estimate and quantify the dietary diversity of a San group, and to investigate how socioeconomic characteristics affect dietary diversity. The dietary data (n = 200) for this cross-sectional study were collected as a part of a larger doctoral research investigating food environment, food choices, and dietary changes of the Khwe San in Bwabwata National Park East. Results The mean dietary diversity score (DDS) of the participants was 2.44 out of 10, with only two people having a DDS of 5. 87.5% of participants consumed only from 2 or 3 different food groups, mainly grains/roots and dark green leafy vegetables. DDS significantly correlated only with the level of education and with age. Due to their collinearity, the group with no education had the lowest DDS, but also belonged to the oldest age group. The overall dietary diversity of the Khwe is extremely low, indicating severe nutritional inadequacy. The small differences in DDS among the socioeconomic groups indicate the importance of other determining factors, such as cultural and food environmental characteristics.

Magnitude of Overweight, Obesity and Associated Factors among Middle Aged Urban Residents of West Ethiopia

“…The finding of our study was higher than the pooled prevalence of DHS data of 32 sub-Saharan African countries yielding 15.9% [46]; 28.1% in Malawi and in Tanzania the prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults were 24.1% and 19.2% [47]. In study conducted in Namibia among a San groups show 87.5% of the participants consumed food items from only 2 or 3 different food groups, the most frequently eaten food type being maize meal [31]. Similarly, in Addis Ababa reported that 60.4% of them had low DDS [32], 39.7% of people ≥ 40 years had non-diversified diet in Jimma town [33] and in Mirab Abaya wereda Southern Ethiopia had low ( 65.7%) and 34.3% high DDS [34].…”

Drivers of food consumption among overweight mother-child dyads in Malawi

“…Our systematic review of the literature (S1 Text, S1 Fig, and S3 Table ) found that most previous studies on drivers of food consumption in SSA focused on fruit and vegetable intake [21,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. We did not find many significant predictors of fruit intake in our study, but in the rainy season, food affordability, particularly indicators of higher wealth, predicted higher fruit intake in both mothers and children.…”

Factors That Determine the Dietary Diversity Score in Rural Households: The Case of the Paute River Basin of Azuay Province, Ecuador

“…Dietary diversity provides information on household access to a variety of foods [ 67 ], and the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) is intended to reflect a household’s economic ability to access a variety of foods [ 32 ]. In other studies, relationships between the HDDS and the socioeconomic characteristics of the households have been captured, including age, sex, level of education of the head of household, employment status or income, food expenditure, size of agricultural land, training received regarding food preparation and human nutrition, among others [ 9 , 55 , 68 , 69 ]. It is clear that the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic is having and will continue to have consequences on household diets.…”

“…The results also show that the level of education of the head of the household contributes to the improvement of the HDDS. Several studies have shown a positive association between level of education and dietary diversity [ 5 , 9 , 42 , 68 , 72 ]. This means that education has an impact on household nutritional knowledge and the skills to conceptualize and use messages promoting nutrition, consequently contributing to greater dietary diversity [ 41 ].…”