Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Food Consumption Patterns and Predictors of Dietary Diversity in Pastoral Communities of Ngorongoro District, Tanzania
John G. Safari, Shauri K. Timothy and Zacharia S. Masanyiwa
Institute of Rural Development Planning, P.O. Box 138, Dodoma, Tanzania
Current Research Journal of Social Sciences 2020 1:1-12
Received: March 9, 2020 | Accepted: April 27, 2020 | Published: August 25, 2020
Abstract
The aim of this study was to assess the patterns of household food consumption and examine the factors influencing dietary diversity. Data were collected from 238 randomly selected households. Food consumption was assessed in terms of Dietary Diversity Score (DDS) with a range of 0-12. The minimum and maximum DDS were one and eight, respectively. Groups of food consumed were classified into four Quantiles (Q) and households were categorized based on quartile cut-points: Q1 (1-3 DDS), Q2 (4), Q3 (5-6) and Q4 (7-8). Chi square test was used to assess the association between the food groups and quartile level. Ordered probit regression was employed to examine determinants for household dietary diversity. Results show that more than four in ten households (43.3%) consumed less than the minimum recommended four groups of food. Proportions of households consistently decreased with increasing quartile level (43.3% in Q1 to 6.7% in Q4). Only 18% of the households were in the upper quartiles (Q3 and Q4). The DDS means by quartiles were 2.47 (Q1), 4.00 (Q2), 5.00 (Q3) and 5.89 (Q4) with the overall mean DDS of 3.52. While cereal (96.2% of the households) was the most consumed food group, there was limited consumption of vegetables (12.6%), fruits (4.2%) and fish (2.9%). Food accessibility and livelihood diversification were the major determinants of dietary diversity. Demographic and socio-economic factors mediated household’s dietary diversity at varying degree of influence.
Keywords:
Dietary diversity, dietary quality, food security, Maasai, ordered probit, pastoralism,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2041-3246
ISSN (Print): 2041-3238 |
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