GC: n
S : NHS – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345626/ (last access: 9 August 2024); FAO – https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/ (last access: 9 August 2024).
N: 1. First Known Use: 1876. From under and nutrition.
- deficient bodily nutrition due to inadequate food intake or faulty assimilation. Called also “hyponutrition”.
2. Undernutrition is a deficiency of calories or of one or more essential nutrients.
3. What is undernutrition? When individuals are undernourished, they can no longer maintain natural bodily capacities, such as growth, resisting infections and recovering from disease, learning and physical work, and pregnancy and lactation in women. Poor feeding of infants and young children, especially the lack of optimal breastfeeding and responsive complementary feeding, along with such illnesses as diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and HIV/AIDS, often exacerbated by helminths, are major causes of undernutrition.
4. Nutrient deficiencies: Although the so-called diseases of civilization—for example, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes—will be the focus of this article, the most significant nutrition-related disease is chronic undernutrition, which plagues more than 925 million people worldwide. Undernutrition is a condition in which there is insufficient food to meet energy needs; its main characteristics include weight loss, failure to thrive, and wasting of body fat and muscle. Low birth weight in infants, inadequate growth and development in children, diminished mental function, and increased susceptibility to disease are among the many consequences of chronic persistent hunger, which affects those living in poverty in both industrialized and developing countries. The largest number of chronically hungry people live in Asia, but the severity of hunger is greatest in sub-Saharan Africa. At the start of the 21st century, approximately 20,000 people, the majority of them children, died each day from undernutrition and related diseases that could have been prevented. The deaths of many of these children stem from the poor nutritional status of their mothers as well as the lack of opportunity imposed by poverty.
S: 1. MW – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/undernutrition (last access: 9 August 2024). 2. MSD – https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/disorders-of-nutrition/undernutrition/undernutrition (last access: 9 August 2024). 3. UNICEF – http://www.unicef.org/progressforchildren/2006n4/index_undernutrition.html (last access: 2 September 2014). 4. EncBrit – https://www.britannica.com/science/nutritional-disease (last access: 9 August 2024).
SYN:
S:
CR: acute undernutrition, cachexia, chronic hunger, famine, hunger, inanition, kwashiorkor, malnutrition, marasmus, nutritional edema, scurvy, undernourishment.
