While women's role in the food chain is essential to produce that all-important resource, food, it paradoxically does not guarantee women even minimum levels of nutrition.
Malnutrition adversely affects women's participation in the economic system and their productivity.
To break this vicious downward spiral, it is important to focus simultaneously on women's nutrition-related roles and their nutritional status. Nutritional stress on women is the outcome of low dietary intake on account of economic and social backwardness, and their high energy output for work and child-bearing. That third-world women work more than men when economic and domestic labour are combined seems now to be widely accepted. Their reproductive responsibility is inescapable. Among the consequences of this triple burden of market production, home production, and reproduction are high levels of protein-energy malnutrition and anaemia among women.