Diversified Diet Feeding Practice is Low Compared to the WHO Recommendation in the Dabat Demographic and Health Surveillance System Site: Finding from the Baseline Survey of Nutrition Project, 2016

Abstract Introduction Improving infant and young child feeding practices is critical to improved nutrition, health, and development of children. The country of Ethiopia has also adopted the WHO recommendations of child feeding practices and developed the national guideline of infant and young child feeding to improve child’s nutrition and health status. However, a few children start and received appropriate complementary feeding based on the recommendation. Therefore, the study aimed to determine dietary diversity score and its associated factors among under five children at Dabat Demography Surveillance System site (HDSS), northwest Ethiopia. Methods A cross-sectional community based study was from February to June 2016. All children aged 6-59 months old who lived in HDSS site were included in the survey. The collected data were checked and entered into Epi info version 7 and exported to STATA version 14 statistical software for analysis. Both crude odds ratio (COR) and adjusted odds ratio (AOR) with the corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated to show the strength of association. Finally, a p-value of 0.05 was used to determine if the association was statistically significant. Results In this study, about 34.87% (95%CI: 33.27, 36.49%) of the children received adequately diversified diet. The odds of receiving adequately diversified diet was higher among children whose mother had secondary and above education (AOR= 6.51; 95%CI: 4.95, 8.56), mother who had ANC (AOR = 1.90; 95%CI: 1.60, 2.26) and PNC visit (AOR= 1.31; 95%CI: 1.00, 1, 72). However, a lower dietary diversity score is observed among young children (AOR=0.59; 95%CI: 0.41, 0.85), and children from food inscured household (AOR=0.76; 95%CI: 0.63, 0.92). Conclusions Diversified diet feeding practice is low compared to the WHO recommendation in the surveillance site. Age of the child, maternal education, ANC and PNC visit, and household food insecurity were significantly associated with Dietary diversity score of children. Hence, various actions need to scale up the current practices of child feeding by improving HHFSS, strengthening ANC and PNC counselling about child feeding options, and feeding of young infants.