Over 11 per cent of households in Bangladesh always face food shortage while another 14 per cent of the households sometimes face such crisis, a preliminary report of the Nutrition, Health and Demographic Survey of Bangladesh 2011 said on Monday.
The findings were made public at a function at the Institute of Nutrition and Food Science of University of Dhaka.
The survey covering 6,274 households was done by three professors of the institute with the objective of ‘Assessing and Improving the Consummation Effects of Agriculture Policies and Programmes in Bangladesh.’
Nationally, food accounted for 67 per cent of the total household expenditure, the survey found.
Nazrul Islam Khan, one of the investigators said the survey also measured fasting blood glucose level in people over 40 and found that 10 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women in the age bracket were suffering from diabetes.
‘Urban people are more susceptible to diabetes than their rural counterparts,’ he said.
About the nutrition status children, the survey found that about 45 per cent of them were underweight and 40 per cent were stunted.
The report said only 49 per cent of women surveyed said that they  knew that condom use could reduce the risk of getting infected with HIV virus while about 90 per cent of the women said that they never heard about syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease.
The institute conducted the survey between March 2011 and March 2012, after a gap of 16 years.
It would release the final report in March, investigators said.
Among others, M Akhteruzzaman and Sheikh Nazrul Islam were present.