Country’s income level
World Bank classifies countries according to their income
level. This review focused on LAMICs. They are
also sub-divided into selected Low Income Countries
(LICs) and Middle Income Countries (MICs). MICs are
further classified into Lower Middle Income Countries
(LMICs) and Upper Middle Income Countries (UMICs).
Income levels of each country can predict the level of
undernutrition or overweight. We therefore treated this
as a confounding variable in this review. We extracted a
list of countries and their development indices from the
World Bank database [27]. A recent classification gave a
total of 139 LICs and MICs (Additional file 1: Table S1).