Nutrition
NutritionAs political commitment is an essential ingredient for elevating food and nutrition security onto policy agendas, commitment metrics have proliferated. Many conflate government commitment to fight hunger with combating undernutrition. The authors test the hypothesis that commitment to hunger reduction is empirically different from commitment to reducing undernutrition through expert surveys in five high-burden countries:… Read more
Looking back on 25 years of water, sanitation and hygiene monitoring, the report provides a comprehensive assessment of progress since 1990. The MDG target for drinking water was achieved in 2010 but the world has missed the sanitation target by almost 700 million people. In 2015, 663 million people still lack improved drinking water sources,… Read more
Intensive handwashing promotion can reduce diarrheal and respiratory disease incidence. To determine whether less intensive, more scalable interventions can improve health, we evaluated a school-based handwashing program. We randomized 87 Chinese schools to usual practices: standard intervention (handwashing program) or expanded intervention (handwashing program, soap for school sinks, and peer hygiene monitors). We compared student… Read more
Schooling predicts better reproductive outcomes, better long-term health, and increased lifetime earnings. We used data from 5 cohorts (Brazil, Guatemala, India, the Philippines, and South Africa) to explore the relative importance of birthweight and postnatal weight gain for schooling in pooled analyses (n = 7945) that used appropriate statistical methods [conditional weight (CW) gain measures… Read more
Diarrhoea is an important cause of death and illness among chil- dren in developing countries; however, it remains controversial as to whether diarrhoea leads to stunting. We conducted a pooled analysis of nine studies that collected daily diarrhoea morbidity and longitudinal anthropometry to determine the effects of the long- itudinal history of diarrhoea prior to… Read more
Despite the popularity of school meals, little evidence exists on their effect on health outcomes. This study uses newly available longitudinal data from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India to estimate the impact of the introduction of a national midday meal program on anthropometric z-scores of primary school students, and investigates whether the program… Read more
Levels of child malnutrition in India have fallen only slowly during the 1990s, despite significant economic growth and considerable expenditure on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, of which the major component is supplementary feeding for malnourished children. To begin to unravel this puzzle, this article assesses the programme’s placement and its outcomes, using… Read more
There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, but the number of people who do not have enough to eat remains unacceptably high, with disproportionate impacts on women and girls. Reversing this shocking trend must be a top priority for governments and international institutions and responses must treat food insecurity as… Read more
The dominant nutrition discourse concerns access to adequate food and its quality. It now includes food security, food rights and justice, governance and agriculture. Despite many initiatives to assure food access, and growing economies, high levels of undernutrition persist in much of Asia. It is increasingly suggested that much of this ‘Asian enigma’ can now… Read more
This synthesis report aims to support States’ discussions going forward, taking stock of the negotiations on the post-2015 agenda and reviewing lessons from pursuit of the MDGs. It stresses the need to “finish the job” – both to help people now and as a launch pad for the new agenda. In the report’s conclusion, the… Read more
In the past few years, new evidence has shown that investments in nutrition encourage healthy growth of children, nations, and economies. Optimal nutrition from the start of a woman’s pregnancy to her child’s second birthday 1,000 days later, provides an optimal opportunity to influence cognitive development and growth and improve chances for a successful future. Furthermore, through the global… Read more