Smoking Tied to Malnutrition in the Developing World

In rural Indonesia, smoking is a fairly common habit and can be met at every corner. However, because the region is so impoverished, there is little money for buying cigarettes, and a new study has revealed that most men who smoke there take money out of their families' food budget in order to satisfy their own needs, which contributes to children having a worse diet and imbalanced nutrition. The researchers, Steven Block and Patrick Webb of the Tufts University, say that the effects of smoking in this area, and others like it, go well beyond the harm that the men inflict upon themselves.

The new investigation was conducted on about 30,000 homes in Java, Indonesia, most of which had occupants living well below the poverty level. The numbers are harsh. It would appear that in the basic rural family, where at least one smoker resides, up to ten percent of the family's budget goes on buying tobacco. Another 68 percent is spent on food, while the remaining 22 percent is spent on other items that are neither food, nor tobacco. More details will be published in the October issue of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.

“This suggests that 70 percent of the expenditures on tobacco products are financed by a reduction in food expenditures,” the authors write. “The combination of direct health threats from smoking coupled with the potential loss of [food] consumption among children linked to tobacco expenditure presents a development challenge of the highest order,” they say. Statistics also show that nearly 60 percent of all Indonesian men smoke, which means that the threat is present in more than half of the country's homes.

The team has also determined that the children of smokers tend to be a little shorter on average than the children of non-smokers. Height is often used in such conditions as an indicator of the nutrition quality each of the young ones is getting. The scientists also argue that the negative effect that smoking has on nutrition is “an intuitive but rarely documented empirical finding.”