Orange Fanta versus orange fruit: A novel measure of nutrition knowledge in Malawi

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel survey instrument to identify distinct components of nutrition knowledge and test for links between knowledge and dietary choices in Southern Malawi. Our first aim is to distinguish respondents' familiarity with recommended behaviours, such as when to start breastfeeding or introduce solid foods, from respondents' factual knowledge about mechanisms, such as whether biscuits or papaya and orange fruit or orange Fanta contribute more to future health. We find knowledge of nutrition behaviours to be strongly associated with more schooling, older age, and being female, whereas knowledge of mechanisms is associated only with training and employment as a health professional. We then test whether this expanded definition of nutrition knowledge is associated with dietary intake when controlling for other factors and find no significant links in these data. Results point to the need for knowledge surveys and public health behaviour-change campaigns to address the kinds of information that might have the most influence on actual behaviour, potentially including the mechanisms involved in food composition, food safety, and disease transmission.

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

“…Importantly, we also observed that dyads with overweight children were more likely to purchase special foods for children and spend more money on these special foods. Previous studies found that Malawian parents in rural areas have a preference for packaged foods, like biscuits, Kamba puffs (a packaged snack food), and orange soda, over less processed, more nutrient dense alternatives [ 59 – 62 ]. Together with our findings, this suggests that behavior change communication interventions targeting feeding of “junk” foods to young children could be important for tackling the obesity epidemic in this setting.…”

First foods: Diet quality among infants aged 6–23 months in 42 countries

“…In addition to wealth, we use several other socioeconomic indicators that we interpret primarily as proxies for knowledge and preferences. Formal education, in particular has been shown to be a strong predictor of nutritional knowledge (Webb and Block, 2004, Schneider and Masters, 2019). We measure formal education as years of schooling of mothers and their partners (usually the father of the child).…”

Caste-Based Inequality in Fruit and Vegetable Consumption in India

“…Level of education, measured as years of schooling of the female spouse, is used to proxy nutritional knowledge. 22 , 23 We also include a dummy variable representing female-headed households, based on the research 24 which suggests that the nutrition sensitivity of household resource allocation is gender dependent.…”