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Association between dietary diversity and nutritional status of the children aged 6–23 months in Bangladesh: evidence from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2019

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Abstract

Purpose

To investigate the association between dietary diversity and the nutritional status of Bangladeshi children aged 6–23 months.

Methods

Publicly available secondary Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2019 data were analyzed in this study. Nutritional status was defined using WHO’s guideline for height-for-age z-scores (HAZ), weight-for-height z-scores (WHZ), and weight-for-age z-scores (WAZ). For dietary diversity, we considered seven major food groups according to the WHO-IYCF guidelines. Minimum dietary diversity was considered if a child consumed foods from at least four food groups in the previous 24 h.

Results

The mean (±SD) dietary diversity score (DDS) was found 2.6 ± 1.4 and minimum dietary diversity (MDD) prevalence was 28.7% among the children aged 6–23 months. We found higher the mothers’ education, the higher the MDD prevalence; however, gender variation did not play a significant role. North-eastern district Sunamganj of Bangladesh had the lowest (9%) MDD prevalence. Children who did not consume foods from at least four food groups had 24% significantly higher possibility to be underweight [COR = 1.24, 95% CI: 1.05–1.45] which was found in the unadjusted model; however, this association was not significant after adjusting with age, sex, habitat, wealth index, division, and maternal educational status of the children [AOR = 1.15, 95% CI: 0.97–1.36]. Children who belong to the richest wealth strata and whose mothers had higher secondary or higher educational status had 2.5- and 1.9-times higher likelihood to achieve MDD, respectively.

Conclusion

Although we did not find any significant association between dietary diversity and nutritional status in our analysis, we found that a very low proportion of children have their minimum dietary diversity. Nationwide infant and young child feeding education intervention program may scale up the dietary diversity.

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Data availability

Dataset used in this study is freely available upon request from the MICS portal.

Code availability

Not applicable

Abbreviations

MICS:

Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey

HAZ:

Height-for-Age Z-score

WHZ:

Weight-for-Height Z-score

DDS:

Dietary Diversity Score

MDD:

Minimum Dietary Diversity

SDGs:

Sustainable Development Goals

LMICs:

low- and middle-income countries

IYCF:

infant and young child feeding

WHO:

World Health Organization

UNICEF:

United Nations Children’s Fund

BBS:

Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics

SES:

socio-economic status

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Acknowledgements

The authors share sincere acknowledgement to UNICEF, MICS for providing access to the dataset.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community Health and Hygiene, Faculty of Nutrition and Food Science, Patuakhali Science and Technology University, Dumki, Patuakhali-8602, Bangladesh

    Md. Sabbir Ahmed & Liton Chandra Sen

  2. Department of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, Faculty of Nutrition and Food Science, Patuakhali Science and Technology University, Dumki, Patuakhali-8602, Bangladesh

    Jasmin Ara Farhana

  3. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, NS B3H 4R2, Canada

    Fakir Md Yunus

Authors
  1. Md. Sabbir Ahmed
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  2. Liton Chandra Sen
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Contributions

MSA: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, writing original draft, review and editing, and validation. LCS: writing original draft and review and editing. JAF: writing original draft and review and editing. FMY: conceptualization, data analysis, writing original draft, review and editing, and validation.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Md. Sabbir Ahmed.

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval

As this study is based on a secondary dataset, we did not need any ethical approval. Datasets are freely available upon request at https://mics.unicef.org/surveys, and we received authorization from the MICS team to use the dataset for analysis. However, survey protocol of MICS was approved by the technical committee of the Government of Bangladesh lead by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). Written informed consent was obtained from the participants before data collection.

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Not applicable

Consent for publication

All authors read the final version of the manuscript and approved.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Ahmed, M., Sen, L.C., Farhana, J.A. et al. Association between dietary diversity and nutritional status of the children aged 6–23 months in Bangladesh: evidence from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2019. Nutrire 47, 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41110-022-00155-x

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