MANILA, July 5 (Xinhua) -- Officials of a Filipino government research institute said Saturday 4 million Filipino children are malnourished and the number is expected to grow as inflation forces households to cut down on food, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said on its website.

    The officials of the Food and Nutrition Research Institute were quoted by the newspaper report as saying that most of malnourished children live in the southern Mindanao region, the central region of southern Tagalog and Eastern Visayas, where up to one-third of children under the age of 10 are either underweight or short for their age.

    In the capital region of Metro Manila, four out of every 100 children are also underweight due to mal-nutrition, said the report.

    Moreover, the increasing food prices would only worsen the malnutrition in the country, as the households begin cutting down their food budgets, said the report.

    Many households are reducing purchase and consumption of fruits and meat, while vegetables and fish remain on the table because they are relatively cheaper, according to the report.

    Filipino children are not eating enough vegetable and their diet consists mostly of foods high in salt and sugar and low in nutrition or low protein, energy, and vitamin intake, said the report.

    Meanwhile, about 1.6 million Filipino kids are over-nourished, said the research institute, which is charged by the Department of Science and Technology to provides relevant technologies and scientific information on food and nutrition.

    The inflation rate in June hit a 14-year-old high of 11.4 percent in the Philippines, mainly due to high oil and food prices and a weakening peso, the local currency, in exchange rate against the U.S. dollar.