Dietary Diversity: Determinants and Its Relationship with Nutritional Outcomes in Uttar Pradesh

Household consumption behaviour differs in many ways from each other. In this paper, we analyse the dietary diversity among households in Uttar Pradesh and try to understand whether the differences in the degree of variety in food consumption can be attributed to various characteristics of the household. Moreover, as diverse and healthy diets are recognised as an ultimate solution to malnutrition, we also examine the empirical connection between dietary diversity and nutritional outcomes. The study utilises household level food consumption data from the NSS 68th Round Survey and key nutritional indicators from the 4th National Family Health Survey. The Simpson index of dietary diversity shows that majority two-third of the households belonged to the medium category, followed by low diversity and high dietary diversity was found to be less than 5 per cent of the households. However, the households living in urban and western Uttar Pradesh were having a relatively higher degree of dietary diversity than rural and eastern Uttar Pradesh, respectively. The determinant analysis suggests that households’ income, education level and type of occupation of head of the households, had a significant and positive influence on dietary diversity in both the rural and urban areas, however family size had a negative influence. In addition, land size and age of the head of the households were also important factors, but only for rural households. On an average, 1000 rupees increase in household’s income would lead to 0.03 increase in the dietary diversity score of rural households, while 0.01 in case of urban households. The farming households’ dietary diversity was significantly higher than labour households in the rural areas. Similarly, selfemployed households had better dietary diversity than labour households in the urban areas. Malnutrition indicators clearly indicated that Bahraich and Shrawasti were the worst affected districts in Uttar Pradesh, while Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad reported lowest incidence of malnutrition. Further, the multivariate regression analysis at the district level highlights that dietary diversity plays a significant role in improving the nutritional outcomes. It was found that a 10 per cent increase in the Simpson index would reduce the incidence of underweight by 1.4 per cent in case of adults and about 2 per cent in children. The study suggests that promotion of diversified food among the households is the most important for the reduction of incidence of malnutrition problems.