EAT NUTRIENT-RICH FRUIT, VEGETABLES AND MEAT AND YOU WILL MARRY AND BE SUCCESSFUL

Good Feeding is not just about calories but nutrients, too; The damage malnutrition(Lack of
nutrients) does in the first 1,000 days of life is also irreversible. malnourished children are
less likely to go to school, more likely to struggle academically. They earn less than their
better-fed peers over their lifetimes, marry poorer spouses and die earlier.

This is the damning fact as once observed by George Orwell who wrote of the English
working classes: The basis of their diet is white bread and butter, corned beef, sugared tea,
and potatoesan appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on
wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread, or if they ate their carrots raw? Yes
it would, but the point is, no human being would ever do such a thing.A millionaire may
enjoy breakfasting with orange juice and wholemeal biscuits; an unemployed man does
notWhen you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you dont want to eat dull
wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty. The ordinary human being
would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this,
that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.

Orwell was describing something that has become one of the worlds neglected scourges:
the bad diet of the poor. When people think of malnutrition, they usually picture its most
acute formlistless infants with bloated bellies, the little victims of famine. But there is a
chronic manifestation of hunger, too, milder but more widespread. It affects those with
enough calories to eat but too few micronutrients (they lack vitamins, minerals and so on).
They suffer the diseases of poor nutrition.

Of the 40 nutrients people need, four are in chronically short supply: iron, zinc, iodine and
vitamin A. Vitamin A is essential for the mucous membranes that protect the bodys organs,
such as the eyes. Lack of it causes half a million children to go blind every year; half of them
die within a year as their other organs fail. Vitamin A supplements are the experts top
choice. Zinc deficiency impairs brain and motor functions and causes roughly 400,000
deaths a year. Shortage of iron (anaemia) weakens the immune system and affects, in some
poor countries, half of all women of child-bearing age.

The missing nutrients bite wide and deep. Education levels drop (malnourished children
concentrate poorly); earning-power weakens. Even marriage chances wane: malnourished
boys marry women of lower educational levels when they grow up.
These diseases are stunningly widespread. Over half of women in Africa and two-thirds of
those in East Africa are anaemicdeficient in iron. Lack of vitamin A causes membranes
around the organs to shrivel, leaving them vulnerable. The first to go are the eyes: half a
million children become blind each year. Then, the other organs: half of those children will
die within 12 months. In Uganda a third of the population do not have enough calories; two-
thirds lack vitamin A.

Such deficiencies have long-term consequences for the whole society. In Tanzania, children
whose mothers were given iodine capsules when pregnant stayed at school for four months
longer than their siblings born when the mother did not get those capsules. Children
suffering from nutrient deficiencies cannot concentrate and have lower scores in tests for
cognitive ability. And there seems to be a link between nutrition in childhood and earnings
in later life. In Kenya children who were given nutrition-improving deworming pills for two
years earned about $3,000 more over their lifetime than those who got them for only one
year.

Better nutrition, in short, is not a matter of handing out diet sheets and expecting everyone
to eat happily ever after. Rather, they have to try a range of things: education; supplements;
fortifying processed foods with extra vitamins; breeding crops with extra nutrients in them.
But the nutrients have to be in things people want to eat. Kraft, an American food
manufacturer, makes Biskute, an energy biscuit with lots of extra vitamins and minerals, a
bestseller in Tanzania by charging the equivalent of just 0.5 cents a packet. It also did well in
wider Africa with Tang, a sweet powdered drink with added nutrients, marketing it to
children for the taste and mothers for its nutritional value.

It is also possible to breed plants that contain more nutrients. Since 2007 an organisation
called HarvestPlus introduced an orange sweet potato, containing more vitamin A than the
native sort, in South west Uganda. Over 50,000 farmers have started to plant it or crops like
it, It has caught on and now commands a 10% price premium over the ordinary white
variety. The local populations vitamin intake has soared.

HarvestPlus also has a pipeline of biofortified crops: It released a vitamin A-rich cassava in
Nigeria in 2011. This year it will bring vitamin A-rich maize (corn) to Zambia and iron-rich
beans and pearl millet to Rwanda, rice with zinc, due for release in 2013.

Even where there is enough food, people do NOT seem healthier. On top of 1 billion without
enough calories, another 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they lack micro-
nutrients (this is often called hidden hunger). And a further 1 billion are malnourished in
the sense that they eat too much and are obese. It is a damning record: out of the world
population of 7 billion, 3 billion eat too little, too unhealthily, or too much.

Malnutrition is attracting attention now because the damage it does has only recently
begun to sink in. The misery of lacking caloriesbloated bellies, wasted limbs, the lethargy
of famineis easy to spot. So are the disastrous effects of obesity. By contrast, the ravages
of inadequate nutrition are veiled, but no less dreadful.

Malnutrition is associated with over a third of childrens deaths and is the single most
important risk factor in many diseases. A third of all children in the world are underweight
or stunted (too short for their age), the classic symptoms of malnourishment.

Governments often try to deal with the problems of nutrition in the same breath as the
problems of starvation: by dishing out cheap food. These policies do almost nothing to get
micronutrients to those who lack them.

What is needed are little interventions: adding iodine to salt here, giving out vitamin A
supplements there. Even relatively small doses work. Yet they also raise one of the great
puzzles of development. Vitamin A supplements cost just a dollar or two. Their benefits
preservation from fatal diseases, higher lifetime earningsso massively outweigh the tiny
costs that poor people ought to snap them up. Yet they dont. The problem is, the poor
want something tasty...When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you dont
want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty.

The implication is that there should be a rethink of poor countries food policies. Top-down
efforts fail. But governments, companies and international institutions can do good by
stealth. Firms like Nestl and Kraft are busy stuffing packaged foods with extra nutrients.
People buy them because they like the taste. Biofortified foods (crops with extra vitamins
bred into them) work, too. Public money should be concentrated not on supplying cheap
food but on providing for those who do not control what they eat: babies and children. The
most important period in anyones nutritional life is the first 1,000 days. Improving infant
diets does a lifetime of good. But this depends on education and policy not cheap rice or
matooke.
Governments around the world are paying increasing attention to nutrition. In 2010 donors,
charities and companies drew up a how-to policy guide called SUN (which stands for scale
up nutrition). Britains Department for International Development and other aid agencies
are devoting more of their money to nutritional projects. The World Bank has nailed its
colours to the mast with a book called Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development.
Save the Children, an international charity, talks about galvanising political leadership
behind the effort. Underlying all this is a change in thinking about how best to improve
nutrition, with less stress on providing extra calories and food and more on improving
nutrition by supplying micro-nutrients such as iron and vitamins.

In the 1960s and 1970s, ending hunger and malnutrition seemed relatively simple: you grew
more crops. If the harvest failed, rich countries sent food aid. But the Ethiopian famine of
1984 undermined this approach. Here was a disaster of biblical proportions in a country
where food was available. It was a reminder of what experts had long taught: what really
matters with food is not the overall supply, but individual access.

So in the 1990s and early 2000s the emphasis switched to helping people obtain food. This
meant reducing poverty and making agricultural markets more efficient. Between 1990 and
2005 the number of people living on less than $1 a day in poor countries (at 2005
purchasing-power parity) fell by a third to 879m, or from 24.9% of the total population to
18.6%.

Yet the food-price spike of 2007-08 showed that this approach also had limitations. Prices of
many staple crops doubled in a year; millions went hungry. The world remains bad at
fighting hunger. Experts argue about exactly how many people are affected, but the number
has probably held flat at just below 1 billion since 1990.

CONCLUSION
The good news is that better nutrition can be a stunningly good investment. Fixing micro-
nutrient deficiencies is cheap. Vitamin supplements cost next to nothing and bring lifelong
benefits. Every dollar spent promoting breastfeeding in hospitals yields returns of between
$5-67. And every dollar spent giving pregnant women extra iron generates between $6-14.
Nothing else in development policy has such high returns on investment.
But in many countries the problem of hidden hunger is hidden from victims themselves,
so there is no pressure for change. If everyone in a village is undernourished, poor nutrition
becomes the norm and everyone accepts it. This may also explain the reluctance of poor, ill-
fed people to spend extra money on food, preferring instead to buy such things as
televisions or a fancy wedding.

And nutrition can also be improved in all sorts of ways, including by better sanitation,
increase dietary variety, by vaccinating children against diseases; by educating women to
breastfeed babies for longer, to improve immunity and most importantly to focus on the
first 1,000 days of life (including pregnancy).

Such efforts are hard to organise and cannot work unless politicians support it.
Malnutrition reduction needs powerful champions who know how to get things done
across government.

And just as the damage from malnutrition builds up over a lifetime, so better nutrition
reveals its benefits only over many years, as well-fed mothers pass on good health to well-
fed children.