Malnutrition in Bengal

Malnutrition is a term which is not quite easy to define. A review in the literature will show that different workers in the field hold different views about the state of malnutrition and its cause. Most workers however hold the view that malnutrition is not caused by underfeeding alone but by the prolonged use of food in which certain-essential constituents of food are either absent or present in insufficient quantities. Apart from the difficulty in properly defining malnutrition, it appears that it is more difficult to set up a definite cut and dried standard by which the degree of malnutrition could be easily measured.