The quiet emergency
Nutrition Month, observed nationwide every July since the 1970s, is the busiest month for me—almost comparable to the Christmas rush. Every year, I work on different campaigns and feeding programs backed by the government.
Decades later, the celebration of this month still exists to keep that uncomfortable truth in public view. And the most recent national data suggest the country still has a long way to go.
Children are still not growing the way they should
It is easy to treat it as a seasonal ritual, somewhere between a health campaign and a school activity. But behind the slogans is a problem the country has been unable to solve for a generation: too many Filipino children are still not growing the way they should.
The clearest picture comes from the 2023 National Nutrition Survey (NNS), conducted by the Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (DOST-FNRI). It covered more than 36,000 households and over 115,000 individuals, making it the most authoritative snapshot of the country’s nutrition situation.
Among children under five years old, the survey found:
• 23.6 percent are stunted — too short for their age, the sign of long-term, chronic undernutrition
• 5.6 percent are wasted — too thin for their height, a sign of acute undernutrition
• 15.1 percent are underweight
• 3.7 percent are overweight-for-height — a smaller but steadily rising problem
Stunting is the number that worries nutritionists most. It reflects months or years of inadequate nutrition, usually beginning in the womb and the earliest years of life. Its effects are largely irreversible: stunted children tend to have weaker immune systems, do worse in school, and earn less as adults. It is, in effect, a tax on a child’s entire future—and on the country’s.
There is, however, good news buried in the trend line. Stunting among under-fives has fallen dramatically over the decades, from 44.7 percent in 1989 to 23.6 percent in 2023. Underweight rates have been nearly halved over the same period. This is real progress, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
But two things spoil the celebration. First, wasting has barely moved, hovering around 6 percent for more than 30 years. Second, stunting progress has stalled over the last two decades—the rate has hardly improved since the early 2000s, even as the economy grew.
There is a revealing tension buried in the data. By one measure, things are clearly improving: household food insecurity (the share of families with moderate-to-severe difficulty accessing enough food, measured by the Food Insecurity Experience Scale) fell from 44.2 percent in 2019 to 31.4 percent in 2023, a trajectory officials rate as “on track” toward a target of 24.4 percent by 2028.
Yet stunting has not fallen in step. Families report more reliable access to food, but children are not growing proportionally better. That gap is the whole story in miniature: the problem is no longer mainly whether there is food on the table, but what is on it.
It’s not poverty, it’s underperformance
The real, and more damning, comparison is with the country’s economic peers. And this is where the story turns uncomfortable.
The Philippines is not a poor country by global standards. Its GDP per capita sits around US$3,985, comfortably above the sub-Saharan African average of roughly US$1,940. It is a lower-middle-income economy that has grown steadily for years.
Yet its nutrition outcomes look like those of countries far poorer. Several nations with comparable or lower incomes have cut stunting faster and further. The Philippines ranks 5th in East Asia and the Pacific for stunting, and remains among the top 10 countries in the world for the sheer number of stunted children.
For a middle-income country with a functioning health system and decades of nutrition programs, that is an underperformance, not a poverty sentence.
Enough calories, too little diversity
We are doing all the right things in principle, but it’s still not working. The 2023 survey looked closely at the country’s food environment—where families get their food and what they bring home—and the picture helps explain why fuller stomachs have not produced healthier children.
Most Filipino families buy from the most convenient, least regulated sources. Sari-sari stores and small retailers are the dominant food source for 61.2 percent of urban and 72.9 percent of rural households—ahead of public markets, wet markets, and supermarkets. These stores are a lifeline, but their shelves lean heavily toward shelf-stable, processed, sugar- and salt-heavy products rather than fresh, perishable, nutrient-dense food.
As one summit slide put it, the food environment has evolved so that the least nutritious choices are often the easiest, cheapest, and most accessible.
This is “child food poverty” made concrete: enough calories, too little diversity.
A holistic approach is what we need
Nutritionists increasingly describe this as a nexus problem. Food security outcomes are shaped by the food environment people encounter daily—prices, availability, marketing, and convenience—which is, in turn, shaped by the broader food system of production, distribution, and policy.
The implication, and the summit’s blunt one-line thesis, is that you cannot fix nutrition outcomes without transforming the food environment, and you cannot transform the food environment without fixing the food system underneath it. Feeding programs alone—however well run—cannot outrun an environment that makes junk the default.
It’s why I firmly believe that a holistic approach is necessary to make things work.
If the moral argument for acting does not move policymakers, the economic one should. Malnutrition is not only a health burden; it is a measurable drag on the entire economy.
What Nutrition Month really addresses
It would be easy to dismiss Nutrition Month as posters and slogans. But the campaign’s real function is to keep a slow-moving emergency from disappearing into the background. Stunting kills no one dramatically—it simply quietly lowers the ceiling on millions of lives, one child at a time.
But Nutrition Month’s quiet challenge is to refuse to accept that as good enough. Because every point that stunting falls is not just a statistic. It is a child who will grow taller, learn faster, and earn more—and a country that grows a little stronger because of it.
Read the full story on lifestyle.inquirer.net
