Conference on 'Malnutrition matters' Symposium 4: Food for thought: challenging problems in malnutrition Child undernutrition in affluent societies: what are we talking about?

In this paper we set out to explore the prevalence of child undernutrition found in community studies in affluent societies, but a preliminary literature review revealed that, in the absence of a gold standard method of diagnosis, the prevalence largely depends on the measure, threshold and the growth reference used, as well as age. We thus go on to explore describe the common clinical ‘syndromes’ of child undernutrition: wasting, stunting and...