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Women and Nutrition: Introduction

The major challenge facing third-world women today is to overcome the resource constraints that consign them to low levels of productivity and well-being. While women’s role in the food chain is essential to produce that all-important resource, food, it paradoxically does not guarantee women even minimum levels of nutrition. Malnutrition adversely affects women’s participation in the economic system and their productivity. To break this vicious downward spiral, it is important to focus simultaneously on women’s nutrition-related roles and their nutritional status. Nutritional stress on women is the outcome of low dietary intake on account of economic and social backwardness, and their high energy output for work and child-bearing. That third-world women work more than men when economic and domestic labour are combined seems now to be widely accepted. Their reproductive responsibility is inescapable. Among the consequences of this triple burden of market production, home production, and reproduction are high levels of proteinenergy malnutrition and anaemia among women. These nutritional problems have received attention in the context of pregnancy and lactation. The consequences of inadequate body reserves, deficient dietary intakes, and the resultant low pregnancy weight gains for birth outcomes, birth weights, and infant survival are established. Maternal depletion on account of high fertility among third-world women has been well recognized, and the consequent high maternal mortality rates of less-developed countries are the subject of great concern. However, less attention has been accorded to these same nutritional problems in the context of women’s general wellbeing and their participation in economic and social development. The papers in this issue of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin focus attention on this critical area.