Report 2011 - Deepalaya

Table 2: Iron needs according to different age group 4 :
Adults, females
Age Group
Iron in mg that should be
absorbed (daily needs)
Infants (5-12 months) 0.7
Children (1-12 years) 1
Adolescents (13-16 years)
1,8 (males)
2,4 (females)
Adults, males 0.9
Menstruation 2.8
Pregnancy, first half 0.8
Pregnancy, second half 3.5
Lactation 2.4
Post-menopause 0.7
As shown in this table, only a small quantity of iron is needed daily because of the recycling process of iron in
the body. During the menstruation, a woman needs to take more iron to restore the blood losses. Moreover,
because menstruation stops during gestation, if no more blood losses or condition decreasing the quantity of
iron in blood occur, requirements are decreased. During pregnancy, as explained in next section, the iron needs
are increasing more than 3 folds during the second half compared to the first half. Furthermore, if a woman is
breastfeeding in her second half of gestation, she will need a higher amount of iron per day. Indian's
recommended dietary intakes in a day are 1000mg/d of calcium and 38mg/d of iron for pregnant woman
compared to 400mg/d of calcium and 30mg/d of iron for a non-pregnant woman who do moderate work 5 .
Thus a woman will have to get more nutrients from her food and to reduce habits that might worsen the lack of
iron in order to avoid anemia. In this way we will show that malnutrition is one of the most contributing factor
of anemia.
MALNUTRITION
For nutritional status, India constitutes a dual society, with a small group of well fed inhabitants and a large
group of undernourished inhabitants. In fact, anemia is part of this big problem in India: malnutrition.
According to a recent FAO reports, about 15 per cent of the world's population suffers from malnutrition,
excluding China 6 . South of Asia composes about the third of this population. Undernutrition, a type of
malnutrition, is the condition which results from an insufficient food intake over an extended period of time. Its
main victims are children under age 15, and those under 5 years old are hit the hardest (nearly 50 per cent of
total deaths in developing countries occur among children under 5 years of age as compared to less than 5 per
cent in developed countries) 7 .
In India, scarcity of food is responsible for malnutrition. On a global basis, malnutrition is a problem of uneven
distribution between the countries and within the countries. There are evidences that ”there would be very less
malnutrition in India today if all the food available could be equitably distributed in accordance with physical
4 Reference 2- p. 539
5 Reference p. 552
6 Reference p. 565
7 Reference 2- p. 566