Home | UNICEF in Action | Highlights | Information Resources | Donations, Greeting Cards & Gifts | Press Centre | Voices of Youth | About UNICEF

New ways to enrich diets

There are many ways to enhance foods to improve the content of the vitamins and minerals that are so important for the well-being of children and their families. Food fortification is one very important way of doing this, and has already helped overcome micronutrient deficiencies in many industrialized countries and some developing ones.

But many of the world's poorest people eat locally grown crops that cannot be fortified. Agricultural scientists are now demonstrating that staple crops can be modified in several ways at the breeding stage, with great nutritional benefit.

The grains and tubers on which the vast majority of people in the developing world depend have certain inherent shortcomings nutritionally. For one thing, these staples tend not to provide all the minerals and vitamins needed to ensure good nutrition. In addition, cereals, depending on several factors, including the degree to which they are refined, contain substances that impede the 'bioavailability' of some important minerals -- the ability of the body to absorb and use them. The most important of these substances is known as phytate, a molecule containing phosphorus. Micronutrients usually come from non-staple foods -- animal products, vegetables and fruits. But the poorest populations often cannot afford these foods and depend on the grains and tubers they can afford. This fact helps explain the high prevalence of some micronutrient deficiencies.

Agricultural research has turned to the science of plant breeding to improve this situation. The goal is to develop staple food crops that contain higher quantities of essential micronutrients - or lower amounts of phytate. In this connection, work is currently being done in the United States to develop low-phytate grain foods for animal consumption. Such grains hold nutritional promise for people as well, according to the results of a recent study, which found that human volunteers absorbed iron at a significantly higher rate from foods prepared using a new low-phytate strain of corn than from an older higher-phytate strain.22

The Consultative Group on In ter national Agricultural Research, made up of 17 internationally funded agricultural research centres, is trying to raise farm productivity and food consumption in developing countries. The group is now coordinating a global effort to increase the micronutrient content of five major staple food crops: rice, wheat, maize, beans and cassava. The aim is to breed plants that load high amounts of vitamins and minerals into their edible parts -- and also into their seeds, allowing them to enrich themselves for subsequent harvests without changing their taste, texture, or the ease with which they are grown.

In developed countries, such crops have already been successfully produced: high-zinc wheat, for example, is being grown in Australia. Estimates are that it will take 6 to 10 years to breed comparable new plants in developing countries. Scientists believe that they will not only improve the daily dietary intake in the developing world but will also significantly increase crop yields because these micro nutrient-dense plants have better germination and more resistance to infection at the vulnerable seed ling stage.

Photo: A girl enjoys an ear of corn in the United States, where researchers have developed a new strain of corn that increases the body's ability to absorb iron.

More effective action for nutrition improvement

The technical advances described in this report, whether new research on nutrition and illness or better ways to detect problems, are not magic bullets. They will contribute to sustainable improvement in nutrition only if they sharpen the ability of people, including the poor, to assess and analyse the causes of malnutrition around them -- and to plan and carry out appropriate responses.

Recent advances in the fields of social science and communication will also help accelerate and sharpen people's ability to take control of actions to reduce malnutrition.

Actions described here to improve child nutrition and thereby improve growth, resistance to illness and cognitive development need to be coupled with other highly effective low-cost interventions that have already been proven to prevent disease and improve child development.

Some of these have yet to be widely exploited. For example, intestinal worms, which contribute to poor growth and development, can be combated through routine deworming using low-cost drugs that are both very safe and highly effective (Panel 20). And child deaths from malaria can be reduced through the use of insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets. These measures have not received adequate global attention and resources, even though every child has a right to their benefits.

Actions to prevent malnutrition in young children also need to be linked to efforts to promote early child development through stimulating play and early learning, and by strengthening interaction with parents and peers. The parents of young children everywhere need regular contact with people who can help check their children's growth and development and can provide advice and support on breastfeeding and complementary feed ing. In many communities, parents and caregivers will also need both advice on and access to supplements of vitamin A, iron, iodine and other micronutrients. Support in these areas might best be provided through established formal institutions -- health centres, clinics or pre-school centres (Panel 21). But where such facilities do not exist or do not function, children cannot wait for them to be built or staffed.

Communities must receive overall support in their efforts to ensure that all families have access to basic preventive actions to improve the nutrition of children and pregnant women. This includes strengthened health services to prevent and treat disease, and increased support to stimulate early child learning, care and development.

None of the preventive and supportive actions to promote child growth and development described in this report require a doctor or nurse or a trained educator. Communities can be helped to organize themselves to provide or administer these services, and in most communities, groups that can take on these responsibilities already exist. Communities can also be helped to assess their own priority problems and can learn to monitor the effectiveness of their actions, redesigning their own programmes accordingly. Combined with the use of effective low-cost technologies, the adoption of these measures could result in rapid improvements not only in child survival but also in child development, nutritional status and learning capacity.

It has often been said that meeting this challenge is a matter of political will. In a $28 trillion global economy, the problem is surely not a lack of resources. But it may be more useful to see the challenge as a matter of political choice. Governments in poor and rich countries alike may choose to allow children to be intellectually disabled, physically stunted and vulnerable to illness in childhood and later life. This is the price of doing little or nothing to ensure good nutrition.

But governments could instead resolve to move to consolidate lessons already learned about reducing malnutrition. They could do everything possible to mount massive actions that can clearly succeed and that can be implemented by communities them selves. And they could encourage research on, and implementation of, new and better actions.

For the well-being and protection of children and the human development of the world, the course of action is clear.

Home | UNICEF in Action | Highlights | Information Resources | Donations, Greeting Cards & Gifts | Press Centre | Voices of Youth | About UNICEF