Last year, in October, I observed Malnutrition Awareness Week (MAW) with other healthcare professionals in the USA, Canada, and the U.K. You may wonder why that’s important. Simply put, malnutrition can lower our quality of life and life expectancy.
What is malnutrition anyway?
On hearing the word, Malnutrition many of us will conjure up images of starving children in war-stricken countries. However, malnutrition is a global issue that affects more people than you may recognise.
Food provides our bodies with the energy and nutrients important for growth, repair and staying active. However, for many of us, access to affordable, nutrient-rich foods is a challenge. Nutrient-dense foods such as fish, fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy, nuts and seeds can be unavailable, inconvenient or unsafe. Pockets of food insecurity exist even in the most developed countries, which we have seen throughout the pandemic.
These poor-quality diets that do not provide the right amounts of nutrients to the body can cause malnutrition – an unbalanced nutrition state. Poor healthcare environments can also increase the risk of malnutrition. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), malnutrition covers two broad groups of conditions, undernutrition and overnutrition.
Faces of Malnutrition
- Undernutrition – having too little calories, protein or other nutrients. Symptoms include poor growth in children, wasting, stunting, frailty especially in the elderly, underweight;
- Micronutrient deficiencies – inadequate supply of vitamins and minerals or micronutrient excesses. This is likely in both under- and overnutrition;
- Overnutrition – eating too many calories. Symptoms include overweight and obesity;
- Diet-related non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease which accompanies excess weight/overweight.
Malnutrition has many faces and sometimes multiple can occur at once. This is often heavily influenced by your socioeconomic status and your country’s development level. In Barbados, you frequently see statistics about overweight or obesity which can be expected for a high-income (by the World Bank standards) Small-Island-Developing-State (SIDS) going through a nutrition transition as our GDP increases. Our lifestyles and diets have changed as we have more exposure to urbanisation, international cuisines and ultra-processed foods. We are more likely to face overnutrition, undiagnosed micronutrient deficiencies and chronic non-communicable diseases.
While the experience can be different for persons living in low-to-middle-income countries. They are more likely to experience undernutrition and micronutrient deficiency due to a lack of access to nutritious foods. This doesn’t mean that undernutrition cannot or does not happen in Barbados. In fact, I think that it is underreported.
The causes of malnutrition are many times greater than individual food choice persons. For example, think about some of your senior relatives and neighbours, they may eat less frequent meals or nutrient-dense foods depending on their access to ingredients and capability. The evidence shows that older adults are often at increased risk of undernutrition and may experience unintentional weight loss. This should be monitored as this puts them at risk for fractures, illnesses and poorer recovery.
Why is awareness important?
Barbados also has an ageing population, so knowing what to look out for is important. The sooner malnutrition or a risk is identified, the sooner an intervention to help can be implemented.
MAW aims to educate healthcare professionals (HCPs) about recognising and treating malnutrition earlier. In turn, clients are better informed about their nutrition status and food choices. Observing MAW also helps increase public awareness of nutrition’s importance in patient recovery from chronic wounds, surgeries, illnesses and managing chronic diseases. Given that health inequality is a critical element in patient malnutrition, especially after discharge, increased screening and public awareness can lead to more lives saved and lower healthcare costs.
If you’re a healthcare professional like me working in clinical or community settings, it’s important that we talk to our patients about malnutrition, access to food and unintentional weight loss. We also need to familiarise ourselves with appropriate screening tools for clients and be careful of unconscious weight bias in our consultations.
If you’re concerned about someone you know who may be at risk of malnutrition, reach out to them. We should be our brother’s keeper.
Created: 21st June 2021. Updated: 22nd January 2025