FAO - Nutrition country profiles: Barbados

Abstract

According to the 1981 national health and nutrition survey 29% of the children under 5 years old were malnourished (0.5% severely, 3.6% moderately and 24.9% mildly) using the Gomez weight-for-age classification. This level represented a decrease in the level of malnourished pre-school children in the population, compared to earlier estimates which indicated that 39% were malnourished (0.3% severely, 3.2% moderately and 35.5% mildly) in 1975. According to the 1981 survey results, 3.8% of the pre- school children were obese (weight-for-height) (Table 4a). Among children 5-9 years, a slightly larger proportion of girls compared to boys were underweight (15.9% vs. 14%) as well as overweight (5.6% vs. 3.2%). No recent data are available to represent the current situation.