Changing lifestyle and prevalence of malnutrition among settled pastoral Fulani children in Southwest Nigeria.
This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional study on the growth of Fulani children, aged 6 months-15 years, living in Kwara, Ogun and Oyo States, South western Nigeria. This population of Fulani are fully settled pastoralists whose economy and culture are now centred on cattle and farming. There is a dearth of information on the prevalence of malnutrition in this group. We measured the heights and weights of 164 girls and 167 boys and determined their anthropometric indices, height-for-age (HA), weight-for-height (WH), and weight-for-age (WA) Z-scores. The prevalence of stunting (HAZ < -2), wasting (WHZ < -2) and underweight (WAZ < - 2) was 38.7 % , 13.6 % , and 38.7 % , respectively, when compared to the reference NC HS WHO standard used for defining stunting, wasting and underweight. Boys were more malnourished than girls, but this was not statistically significant (stunting: chi(2)=0.36; df=1; p=0.54); (underweight: chi(2)=1.10; df=1; p=0.29); and (wasting: chi(2)=0.00; df=1; p=0.98) The mean of Z- scores of height-for-age, weight-for-age and weight-for-height in the study population were -1.502, -1.634 and - 0.931, respectively. The SD was 1.52, 1.09 and 1.20, respectively. Using WHO Malnutrition Classification systems, 38.7 % of the children were found to be malnourished. It was concluded that malnutrition among children in this population could be linked to changing food habits and lifestyle from nomadic to sedentary living.