Socio-Demography Characteristics of Parents of the Adolescent Girls in a Nutrition Education Based Intervention Study in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract

Adolescence is age between 10 to 19years old. In this stage rapid physical, psychological and emotional changes occur in the human body system. For proper human development the stage demands balance of diet.1–3 About one-fifth of the world’s populations are adolescent girls and 84% lives in developing countries.4 Bangladesh has an adolescent and youth population of approximately 52million, which is quantifying to one third of the country’s total population. This major percentage, however, will not remain unchanged and it is proposed that by 2050, only ten to twenty percent of Bangladesh’s population will consist of young people.5 What this means for a country like Bangladesh is that it needs to spend in young people and focus on meeting their health and nutritional needs without further delay. Often health and nutritional status of adolescent girls are direct reflection of the cumulative effects of physical growth, the onset of menarche and increase in fat and muscle mass which place extra nutrition requirements on them. Physical growth of adolescent girls related to their dietary behaviour. If this dietary behaviour is compromised with unhealthy diet, adolescent girls are the worst sufferers of the ravages of various forms of malnutrition because of their increased nutritional needs and low social power. Further low literacy levels, lack of awareness about nutrition and health and poverty aggravate this dismal situation. The cycle of poor nutrition perpetuates itself across generations particularly in girls. The influence of socio-economic status (SES) on health and consequently nutritional status is assumed to begin early in life, perhaps even in the prenatal environment, and continue to accumulate throughout life. SES is thus more than financial well-being or educational achievement; it encompasses a lifetime of access to knowledge, resources, and opportunities.6,7 A large and growing body of evidence shows those socio demographic factorsage, race, ethnicity, and language, for example and socioeconomic status, such as income and education, can influence health and nutritional outcomes.8 Ever-increasing evidence suggests that the health and nutritional status of a population is greatly determined by the social and economic circumstances of that population, as well as its access to health care services.9,10