Vietnam’s recent economic performance on a wide range of monetary indicators has been impressive. The rate of poverty reduction in Vietnam during the 1990s is second only tothat of China. This study attempts to go beyond the picture portrayed by the poverty figures and studies the changes in the extent of undernourishment in Vietnam during this period. Ituses the information contained in the two Vietnamese Living Standard Surveys from the1990s and finds that the picture on undernourishment is nowhere as impressive. This paper exploits the panel nature of the data to construct transition matrices that compare thenutritional status of the households between 1992/93 and 1997/98. These show that asignificant minority of the 4302 households were unable to move out of their state ofundernourishment. A comparison with the poverty rate based transition matrices confirmswhat the aggregate figures suggest, namely, that there is considerable dissonance between thepicture on food expenditure poverty and that on undernourishment. The study, also, performs panel regressions to identify some of the key determinants of undernourishment with a viewto providing the profile of a household that is at greatest risk from undernourishment.