Nutrition and educational achievement of urban primary schoolchildren in Malaysia

The relationship between nutrition, health and educational achievement of s chool-age population in less developed countries has been of interest to ma ny researchers due to the frequent observation that many children did not c omplete primary school and those who completed, did not do as well as child ren in the developed countries. Nevertheless, nutritional and health status by itself is not the only variable affecting educational achievement, sinc e biological, psychological, socioeconomic and cultural factors could direc tly or indirectly affect both nutrition, health status and educational achi evement. The mechanism by which health and nutrition influence educational achievement is not well established, but poor health and malnutrition in ea rly childhood may affect cognitive abilities, necessary for learning proces s and consequently educational achievement. A study was conducted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to investigate the relationship between nutritional statu s and educational achievement among primary schoolchildren from low income households (n = 399). A high percentage of them were mild-significantly und erweight (52%), stunted (47%) and wasted (36%) and increasingly overweight (6%). In general, more boys than girls were found to experience some form o f malnutrition. While weight-for-height did not differ significantly accord ing to family, child and school factors, weight-for-age and height-for-age differed significantly by gender. Also, height-for-age was significantly re lated to household income. This indicates that stunting may be a consequenc e of prolonged socioeconomic deprivation. Educational achievement was measu red based on test scores for Malay language (ML), English language (EL) and mathematics (MT). While a majority of the schoolchildren obtained optimum scores (> 75) for ML and MT, the majority of them had insufficient scores ( < 50) for EL. Children's total score (TS) for the three subjects was signif icantly associated with household socioeconomic status, gender, birth order and height-for-age. Even after controlling for household socioeconomic sta tus, significant association between TS and height-for-age persisted. In th is sample of schoolchildren, household income, gender, birth order and heig ht-for-age were significant predictors of TS. The finding that height-for-a ge is related to educational achievement agrees with other studies, which h ave reported that height-for-age, compared to weight-for-height or weight-f or-age is linked to educational achievement. Height-for-age reflects the ac cumulation of nutritional deprivation throughout the years, which may conse quently affect the cognitive development of the children.