Non-cereal food consumption, food insecurity and nutritional status of children and mothers: a case study in Bangladesh.

AIM The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of food insecurity derived from non-cereal food consumption on nutritional status of children and mothers in a poverty-prone region in Bangladesh. METHODS Data from the Bangladesh Nutritional Surveillance Project, 2005 of Helen Keller International were used to relate non-cereal food consumption and household food insecurity to nutritional status of children and their mothers. Multiple regressions were used to determine the association between the nutritional outcomes and the explanatory variables. In the case of binary and multi-level outcomes, logistic regressions were used as well. RESULTS Non-cereal dietary diversity was found to have little predictive power on BMI and MUAC of mothers and on the nutritional status of the children. Maternal education is strongly associated with mothers' and children's nutritional status. CONCLUSION Dietary diversity based on non-cereal food consumption can be a useful tool to investigate the nutritional status of poor households, but more studies are needed to verify these findings.