Malnutrition in England

There is a high incidence of vitamin D deficiency ( scurvy) in the Asian community.
As in all statistics they need to be looked at deeper otherwise there is a knee jerk reaction as in the OP.

Whitewavemark2 it wold be interesting to see a breakdown of the figures in your OP

I doubt the situations and reasons are simplistic.

With malnutrition is that including drug dependent people? A lot of those people are, so that would definitely skew the figures. They just don't bother to eat proper food, just a sugar hit .

Statistics don’t give a complete picture. For instance, the highest incidence of children with scurvy are those with autism and developmental delay because of their very restrictive diet.
A high incidence of older people from care homes are admitted to hospital with malnutrition. Not through abuse but because they just don’t want to eat anymore.
As per usual on GN I will put up a disclaimer that any of these diseases caused by neglect or poverty is awful.

Malnutrition does not necessarily mean a lack of food - that is starvation. Malnutrition means a diet of food that makes someone ill because it does not meet their nutritional needs and will include people with eating problems like anorexia, many grossly overweight people and a significant number of elderly people have it through self neglect. Not to mention the number of people who become nalnourished in hospital because nobody has time to feed them.

DH lost 3 stone during an 8 week stay in hospital. He was overweight, it did him no harm. But I am still shocked that at no time was this excessive weight loss, 6lbs a week was neber a cause for comment or concern.

I am sure some malnutrition may be the result of inflation, but there are so many other causes of malnutrition.

Every child in the country gets free school meals up to the end of Year 2. All children from nursery to their fifth birthday get free milk daily. Every child in the country in primary schools receives a piece of free fruit each day. Children who live in low income families are eligible for free school meals throughout their school career, unless their family situation changes and they are no longer a low income family. Add to that food banks where low income families can get free food. Why give children who do not live in a low income family free school meals?
If children are malnourished in Britain today it is unlikely to be because they don’t get free school meals (have you actually seen the quality of school meals provided? I have and it’s pretty dire!) Perhaps City/County Councils not giving licences to more and more junk food outlets such as certain burger or pizza places might help as this type of food contains little nourishment and is available on almost every street corner these days. I’m concerned about the quality of many children’s diet, not the amount of calories they consume.

How is there not more of an outcry about this? Instead, we've got endless coverage about the 'BBC presenter'. It's an absolute disgrace that this is happening in 2023.