Background: During the nutrition transition period which began in the early 1990s in Vietnam, dietary
intake had been changed significantly because of changes in lifestyle and living standard. Objectives:
This paper aims to describe the trend for food expenditure and the frequency of meat
consumption in households in Ba Vi district, Hanoi, Vietnam from 1999 to 2013. Methods: This is a
longitudinal study conducted in Ba Vi district, Hanoi. Semi-annual, face-to face interviews were
conducted by well-trained interviewers with 11,922 households to collect data of the household’s
income, spending for food and meat consumption. Chi-square test for trend was performed to evaluate
the changes of food expenditure over the years. P-value under 0.05 was considered statistically
significant. Results: There were ten times increase in household’s mean income and five times
increase in mean food expenditure from 1999 to 2013. The percentage of household food expenditure
per total family expenditure was really high (55% in 2013). The percentage of rice expenditure
per total food expenditure decreased dramatically from 59.9% in 1999 to 33.1% in 2013 while
spending for other animal-based, high-protein food was an upward trend, particularly meat (10.7%
in 1999 to 24.2% in 2013). The percentage of rice expenditure in well-off households was lower
than poor households (55% vs. 61.8% in 1999 and 31.4% vs. 36.5% in 2013). However, the percentage
of spending for meat in well-off households were much higher than that of poor households
(>10%). Conclusion: Our finding indicated that mean income and food expenditure, particularly
meat intake, of households had increased dramatically from 1999 to 2013. The increase of meat
intake requires reallocation and direction of Vietnam public health funding and strategy.