One fifth of Indonesian households exhibit double burden of malnutrition
"In many ways, Indonesia is a prime example to study these phenomena," says Masoud Vaezghasemi. "As the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia is undergoing very fast transitions -- economically, demographically, health-wise and also nutrition-wise. The Indonesian diet transformed very fast from its traditional diets high in cereal and fibre towards Western pattern diets high in sugars, fat, and animal-source foods. This caused a swift increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity while undernutrition remains a great public health concern." The researchers started off with exploring the distributions of body mass index (BMI) across different socioeconomic groups in Indonesia using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) dataset, which stands out as one of the biggest longitudinal health surveys outside the OECD. According to the results: Difference in BMI among people from different socioeconomic groups became smaller while people within ...