Going by the proliferation of fitness parlours in Kathmandu, it would be hard to tell that Nepal has a serious problem with underweight people, not overweight ones. But then, we don\'t need to remind ourselves that Kathmandu is not Nepal.

The most direct indicator of a nation\'s poverty is the proportion of its population that is underweight. For Nepali adults, it is nearly half. And for children under five, the most vulnerable section of the population, it is an astounding 63 percent.

What these figures mean is that more than six in every ten children in Nepal don\'t get enough to eat. According to UNICEF\'s State of the World\'s Children Report 2000, 47 percent of all Nepali children under five are "moderately or severely" underweight and 16 percent are "severely" underweight.

It gets easier to see how serious this situation is by comparing Nepal\'s nutrition figures to other countries. For example, the proportion of children who are undernourished in Thailand is less than 20 percent, whereas countries like Singapore, Japan or New Zealand don\'t even keep statistics any more for underweight children. (They have data for overweight people because that has a different set of health implications.)

The only consolation, if it can be called that, is that Nepal\'s undernourishment figures are not as bad as some neighbouring South Asian countries (India has 74 of its under-fives moderately or severely undernourished). But the percentage of Nepali infants with low birthweight is one of the highest in the world--a figure that points to widespread and serious undernourishment of mothers.

Malnutrition is easy to measure. And you do it with a tape and weighing machine to find out how much deviation from a reference healthy population there is for stunting (height) and wasting (weight). In Nepal\'s case, 11 percent of all children are moderately or severely stunted. But an astonishingly high 48 percent of children under five are seriously stunted. Stunting and wasting have serious impact the physical and intellectual development of children that carries into adulthood.

Of course, these are not just statistics. Chronically underfed children are more prone to infections and disease. Undernourishment combined with diarrhoeal dehydration is a deadly combination that buttress each other with serious implications on the survival of Nepali children.