Malnutrition Research Paper

Hunger, in terms of physical conditions, is easy to describe. It is the feeling of an empty ache in the pit of one 's stomach. Hunger is characterized by mild to severe contractions of stomach muscles, also known as hunger pangs. The definition of hunger, as stated in lecture, is the uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food which ultimately leads to several forms of malnutrition. Malnutrition generally indicates an inadequacy in the intake of some or all nutritional elements necessary for human health and survival. Although, there is no universally accepted gold standard measurement of malnutrition due to the fact of confounding and interrelated factors associated with malnutrition, there are several ways to measure hunger and malnutrition using health indicators/indices. The three most commonly cited and utilized indices are: Index of Undernutrition (utilized by the FAO), the Global Hunger Index (utilized by the International Food Policy Research Institute), and HungerFREE Scorecard (utilized by ActionAid). According to Larson and Mercer (2004), any health indicator used internationally to describe global health must be …show more content…
Food intake, nutritional status, and mortality are all strongly correlated causing an overestimation due to the double counting. Also the index is insensitive to seasonal and/or other short term food and health shocks. Another limitation, that has been recently addressed, is that the GHI does not include information about micronutrient deficiencies, also known as the hidden hunger. While there are limitations the GHI is still extremely resourceful for instance, GHI is used for cross country comparison, and can be calculated for almost all countries in the world and the date used is fairly reliable. Also the GHI reflects nutritional status of children under five which are a vulnerable group to