Persagi Calls Aceh Experienced Double Burden Of Malnutrition, Diabetes, Hypertension And Heart Lurk

ACEH - Chairman of the Indonesian Nutritionist Association (Persagi) Aceh Province Junaidi stated that Aceh is experiencing a double burden of malnutrition, namely malnutrition and excess nutrition.

"The problem of malnutrition in Aceh is that there is a double nutrition, namely malnutrition (undernutrition) and excess (overnutrition)," said Chairman of the DPD Persagi Aceh Junaidi in Banda Aceh, Antara, Monday, October 25.

Junaidi said the problem of malnutrition was due to the lack of energy and protein, iron (anemia), vitamin A, and iodine. While excess nutrition makes the body overweight and obese.

Junaidi said, based on the latest data from the 2018 Ministry of Health Riskesdas, malnutrition for toddlers from birth to 59 months in Aceh, namely 23.5 percent of malnourished children, 11.9 percent of underweight toddlers.

"Short toddlers or stunting are 37 percent, and children are overweight 3.01 percent. But so far the focus of intervention is stunting," he said.

Junaidi explained that short-term problems from malnutrition have an impact on health, mortality, morbidity, cognitive, motor and verbal development, economy, health costs, lost opportunities because of taking care of sick children.

Then, Junaidi continued, the long-term problems are health, obesity as adults, reproductive health, development, school performance, learning capacity, not achieving maximum potential, economy, and work ability and productivity.

"Excess nutrition has an impact on non-communicable diseases, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, heart disease, atherosclerosis," said Junaidi.

On this occasion, Junaidi said that the cause of malnutrition and stunting was due to low access to food in terms of quantity and quality of nutrition.

"Poor parenting, especially in the behavior and practice of feeding infants and children, low access to health services including sanitation and clean water," he said.

Junaedi said, in overcoming this problem, the Aceh Government has intervened both from the health sector such as promotion and counseling on breastfeeding, calcium supplementation, vitamin A, integrated management of sick toddlers and others.

"Then non-health interventions such as the provision of clean water, sanitation, non-cash food assistance, national health insurance (JKN), PKH, family development for toddlers and so on," he said.

Not only that, continued Junaidi, dealing with the problem of malnutrition and stunting, the Aceh Government has also implemented a gampong (village) nutrition home program.

"This gampong nutrition home program is implemented as a manifestation of the implementation of the Aceh Governor's Decree Number 14 of 2019 concerning efforts to deal with stunting in Aceh," said Junaidi.