Talk:Malnutrition

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Malnutrition article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Archives: 1: 180 days

Medicine: Translation Top‑importance

	Medicine portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which recommends that medicine-related articles follow the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles and that biomedical information in any article use high-quality medical sources. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Translation task force (assessed as High-importance).

Sociology High‑importance

	Society portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Sociology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of sociology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SociologyWikipedia:WikiProject SociologyTemplate:WikiProject Sociologysociology articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Sanitation High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Sanitation, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Sanitation on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SanitationWikipedia:WikiProject SanitationTemplate:WikiProject Sanitationsanitation articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Dietary Supplements Top‑importance

	Malnutrition is part of WikiProject Dietary Supplements, a collaborative attempt at improving the coverage of topics related to dietary supplements. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the project page for more information.Dietary SupplementsWikipedia:WikiProject Dietary SupplementsTemplate:WikiProject Dietary SupplementsDietary supplement articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Psychology Top‑importance

	Psychology portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Psychology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Psychology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PsychologyWikipedia:WikiProject PsychologyTemplate:WikiProject Psychologypsychology articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Malnutrition.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

300 Hindi words article on malnutrition in growing age

300 Hindi words article on malnutrition in growing age 2402:8100:27FA:5AC2:0:32:FE6E:4501 (talk) 15:11, 31 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Mortality claim is wrong; I'm planning to remove

The 'Mortality' subsection of the 'Epidemiology'section begins with the following, nearly all of which is a (presumably translated) quote from a French book by Jean Ziegler, L'Empire de la honte.

Mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58 percent of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 million people, all causes of death combined, die each year. One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished and according to the Save the Children 2012 report, one in four of the world's children are chronically malnourished. In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients".

This seems almost certainly wrong.

Hunger or malnutrition don't show up in the top ten leading causes of global mortality (WHO), even in the section for low-income countries.
It's prima facie incompatible with other sections of this page, eg 'It is estimated that nearly one in three persons globally has at least one form of malnutrition', citing WHO. Note that this includes overnutrition issues like obesity.
It's also highly implausible, although not strictly impossible, that malnutrition would account for 58% of total mortality if, as the quote also says, only one in twelve people is malnourished.

My intention is to come back and remove that claim, replacing it with a more accurate one if I can find a better source (I haven't yet found one; malnutrition is listed in many places as a leading cause of death for children under 5, but I haven't found statistics on its contribution to the overall mortality rate). I'm adding this to the Talk page and waiting two weeks in case someone chimes in with evidence that the claim is correct. eggsyntax (talk) 21:04, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Does Wikipedia have a position on whether each death has exactly one cause, or whether a death can have multiple causes? Can a person die of both tuberculosis and malnutrition? Jaredroach (talk) 13:42, 13 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not that I've seen, although I haven't gone looking at this point. Certainly there can be issues with multiple categorizations of cause-of-death, as we saw with disagreements about how many died from COVID-19. I do read 'Mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006' (emphasis mine) as identifying malnutrition as the primary cause of death.

If there's evidence that 58% of deaths have malnutrition as a substantive-but-not-primary cause, I'd recommend rewording but not removal. It seems unlikely to me that that's actually the case, though, although I'd of course look for more definitive evidence either way before actually editing. eggsyntax (talk) 14:20, 13 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Some more info:

- Our World in Data, drawing from WHO data, gives the rate of death from malnutrition in 2006 as 4.5 per 100,000, which adds up to about 300,000 deaths from malnutrition altogether.

- This Unicef report gives the number of people facing catastrophic food insecurity in 2023 as 705,000; extrapolating back to 2006 based on the Our World in Data chart, that suggests about 1.2 million in 2023.

- The same report shows about 36 million experiencing phase 4 food insecurity in 2023 (conceivably this is where the current source was drawing from? Or it could very well be coincidence). This phase is described as 'Households face large food gaps, which are either reflected in high acute malnutrition levels and excess mortality or mitigated by use of emergency coping strategies, which may entail households selling their last breeding animal or their land or house.'

Having been unable to find sources that give figures anywhere near the current content, I'm going to go ahead and remove the claim later this afternoon. eggsyntax (talk) 17:22, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]