Dietary Pattern and Food Intake Habit of the Under privileged Children Residing in the Urban Slums

Objective: Nutritional status directly affects the growing up of children in terms of physical andmental development. In the urban slums the underprivileged children lag behind the basic necessaryamount of food and nutrition which is likely to lead to their ill development. This study wasundertaken to investigate the dietary food intake pattern among urban slum dwelling childrenattending schools Dhaka city and to examine the association with various social factors.Material Methods: This study is a cross-sectional study among 396 school going children who areresidents of slums in different parts of Dhaka Metropolitan city.Findings: The age of the children were categorized into three age groups; Mean age for the childrenof age group-1 was 6.51 (±1.01) years, for the age group-2 was 9.24 (±1.09) years and for the agegroup-3 was 12.5 (±0.91) years. In 77.8 % of the cases the child gets three meals per day butinadequate in amount. In most of the cases the common foods were rice, lentil, potato and green leafyvegetables. The food frequencies reported by the children were; eggs: 1.4 times per week, milk: 1.2times per week, meat: 0.4 times per week, fish: 2.8 times per week and fruits 2.9 times per week.Those children from families with lower incomes and less educated parents had a dietary patternwhich tended to be poor regarding egg, milk, meat and fruit.Conclusion: The diets of these urban slum school children were inadequate for macronutrients andmicronutrient, which is a danger for significant nutritional and health implications. The need todevelop healthy food supply and habits should be emphasized.