Students Section

India is undergoing socioeconomic, demographic, nutrition, and health transitions. The pace of these interrelated transitions has been steady but slow and uneven across decades, districts, states, and segments of the population. In the first decade of the new millennium, it is clear that India has entered the dual nutrition and health burden era. While persistent undernutrition and its adverse health consequences remain major public health problems, there is a slow but steady increase in overnutrition/obesity and non-communicable diseases. Many medical and nutrition postgraduates want to take some aspect of nutrition and health transition for their dissertation or Ph.D. thesis but hesitate because of a lack of clearly defined criteria for choosing the right instrument, the right technique, and quality control procedures for the measurement of several seemingly simple parameters for assessment of health and nutritional status.

NFI had been conducting training programs on these aspects of nutrition and public postgraduates, regular summer internship programs for MSc nutrition postgraduates, and Adhoc need-based training for interns on request at other times. The teachers of these postgraduates have reported that there has been substantial improvement in the quality of dissertations and the confidence with which the students presented their findings. Over years there has been increasing in the number of requests for internships with NFI but NFI can accommodate only a limited number every year. The suggestion on how to reach these simple tools and techniques to a wider audience who want to use them came as expected from the students themselves. They suggested that NFI should develop and put on the NFI website the simple instruction on what to do, with a pictorial presentation on how to do it, along with a brief write-up on quality control measures. Though it sounded easy the process took time. We learned on the job from batches of interns who were excellent critics.

The development of good pictorial training material is still a work in progress but we felt further delay should be avoided. So we putting the material currently available on the website with the hope that it may help many who are wanting to take up research on dual nutrition and health burden. We look forward to getting their suggestions and comments for further improvement in the material. The instrument specifications, accuracy testing of instruments, the technique of measurement, and quality control procedures to be used for some of the commonly used measurements are presented in the form of PowerPoint slides. By clicking on the content page you will be able to download/view the presentation on the chosen topic.