Internal external poverty and nutritional determinants of urban slum youth

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to determine which commonly selected economic variables affected the nutrition of urban slum youth. An attempt was also made to determine whether noneconomic variables such as attitudes affected nutrition. The exact role of income and its effects on diet was also studied. The findings showed that economic variables do influence the urban slum youth to eat a better diet. Especially significant were sex, occupation of family head, and education of the youth. The attitudinal variable, the youth's attitude toward his actual diet, had the strongest impact on nutrition of all the variables studied. The most important implication of this finding is that attitudes may be the most important aspect of good eating habits, outweighing even economic factors. The fact that income had no relationship to diet led the writer to conclude there are two types of poverty, internal and external, and that the preponderance of the literature speculates with data or reasoning taken from the external group where there apparently is a relationship between income and diet.