Malnutrition among women in Bangladesh is a great concern for near future

In the study, we investigate extensively the levels, trends and differentials of nutritional status of the ever-married women in Bangladesh. To carry out the task fruitfully we have extracted 15,882 women for analyzing nutritional status from nationally representative Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2011. The findings of this study reveal that the mean Body Mass Index of ever-married women in Bangladesh is 21.54±3.94 kg/m2 with considerable variations by background characteristics of the respondents considered in this study. Patterns of BMI over the time points reflect that the mean BMI is increasing 0.68 in every four years beginning from 1996. Under the study, the prevalence of underweight women is still very high with 23.6 % in our country though it is decreasing 7.16 percent in every four years. The result of the study shows that only 58.5 percent women are healthy. The women having overweight is also rapidly increasing over time, which is frightening in Bangladesh in the context of health ground. The prevalence of overweight is observed to be 17.9 percent and the overweight is increasing 4.4 percent in every four years beginning from 2004. Even though undernourishment are still remains the dominant phenotype for women of reproductive age in Bangladesh. The findings show that there is a steady increase of the prevalence of overweight and thus establishes the existence of double burden of malnutrition in both rural and urban poor areas of Bangladesh. In Bivariate and multinomial logistic regression analyses, the variables living environment, geographical region, respondent education, respondent working status, husband’s education, husband’s occupation, access to mass media, socio economic status, food security status, and decision making autonomy have found significant association as well as effect on nutritional status of women in Bangladesh. The insights obtained from this research work represent “A healthy mother is the symbol of a healthy nation”.