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Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?

BACKGROUND: It is widely considered that women have less diverse diets than other household members. However, it has been challenging to establish this empirically since women’s diet diversity is measured differently from that of other household members. OBJECTIVE: In this article, we compare women’...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Gupta, Soumya, Sunder, Naveen, Pingali, Prabhu L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7675769/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32744063
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0379572120943780
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author Gupta, Soumya
Sunder, Naveen
Pingali, Prabhu L.
author_facet Gupta, Soumya
Sunder, Naveen
Pingali, Prabhu L.
author_sort Gupta, Soumya
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: It is widely considered that women have less diverse diets than other household members. However, it has been challenging to establish this empirically since women’s diet diversity is measured differently from that of other household members. OBJECTIVE: In this article, we compare women’s dietary diversity with that of their respective households and thereby generate a measure of “dietary gap.” METHODS: We measure women’s “dietary gap” by using the difference of homogenized household and woman dietary scores (using the same scales). This is done using primary data on 3600 households from 4 districts in India. Additionally, we show the robustness of our results to variations in scale and recall periods used to construct the diet diversity scores. RESULTS: Mean difference tests indicate that women consistently consume 0.1 to 0.5 fewer food groups relative to other household members, with the results being statistically significant at the 1% level. The food groups driving this dietary gap are nonstaples like Vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables, meat/fish/poultry, and dairy. CONCLUSIONS: Results point toward the discrimination faced by women in the variety of the food consumed, the importance of considering comparability in creating indices of diet diversity, and the need to collect more detailed information on diets. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine dietary discrimination faced by women using common scales.
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spelling pubmed-76757692020-12-03 Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet? Gupta, Soumya Sunder, Naveen Pingali, Prabhu L. Food Nutr Bull Original Research BACKGROUND: It is widely considered that women have less diverse diets than other household members. However, it has been challenging to establish this empirically since women’s diet diversity is measured differently from that of other household members. OBJECTIVE: In this article, we compare women’s dietary diversity with that of their respective households and thereby generate a measure of “dietary gap.” METHODS: We measure women’s “dietary gap” by using the difference of homogenized household and woman dietary scores (using the same scales). This is done using primary data on 3600 households from 4 districts in India. Additionally, we show the robustness of our results to variations in scale and recall periods used to construct the diet diversity scores. RESULTS: Mean difference tests indicate that women consistently consume 0.1 to 0.5 fewer food groups relative to other household members, with the results being statistically significant at the 1% level. The food groups driving this dietary gap are nonstaples like Vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables, meat/fish/poultry, and dairy. CONCLUSIONS: Results point toward the discrimination faced by women in the variety of the food consumed, the importance of considering comparability in creating indices of diet diversity, and the need to collect more detailed information on diets. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine dietary discrimination faced by women using common scales. SAGE Publications 2020-08-03 2020-09 /pmc/articles/PMC7675769/ /pubmed/32744063 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0379572120943780 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Research
Gupta, Soumya
Sunder, Naveen
Pingali, Prabhu L.
Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?
title Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?
title_full Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?
title_fullStr Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?
title_full_unstemmed Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?
title_short Are Women in Rural India Really Consuming a Less Diverse Diet?
title_sort are women in rural india really consuming a less diverse diet?
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7675769/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32744063
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0379572120943780
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