Category: Nutrition

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Cassava in Africa

Cassava has a big problem in Africa, and it is called brown streak virus. A virulent strain is spreading rapidly across eastern and southern Africa from a beachhead in Zanzibar, devastating the tubers but leaving the leaves looking healthy, which means farmers don’t realize anything is wrong until it is too late. Scientists from the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have been studying the virus and have developed resistant varieties, by conventional breeding, and these are finding their way to farmers.

There’s a short SciDev piece about brown streak virus which points to a longer, very readable New Scientist article. I know we’re talking about a very serious problem and a very nice solution based on the exploitation of agricultural biodiversity, but normally I wouldn’t blog about this sort of thing, simply because there are so many similar examples out there. But I was inspired to do so on this occasion because I also spotted an article in a Ugandan newspaper (via the wonderful allAfrica.com) which talks about the resistant varieties and efforts to get sufficient planting material of these cultivars into the hands of farmers in a particular district. It’s always nice to see “big” stories from international news sources reflected in the local media.

Cassava is an important constituent of Kinshasa’s urban gardens, whose role in providing nutrition, especially to children, is so well described in a Christian Science Monitor article today. Let’s hope brown streak virus doesn’t reach Kinshasa, but if it does the resistant varieties would find a ready means of dissemination through a project which “organized a team of local volunteers called “Mama Bongisa” (‘mom improver’) to teach mothers in some … impoverished neighborhoods about nutrition and farming.”

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Separating the cows from the goats

Some lactose intolerant people drink goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk because it is more digestible. Turns out they could be at risk of vitamin A deficiency. Well, not really. But a recent French study that compared farmhouse cheeses made from cow’s milk and goat’s milk discovered that chevres contained no beta carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. Vive la difference.

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Taking nutrition seriously in Africa

This commentary — The Sterile Nutrition Debate — has been sitting in my in tray for a couple of months because I really didn’t know what to do with it. In it an industrial chemist called Basil Kransdorff argues that the medical establishment and policy makers have consistently failed to take good nutrition seriously. They either regard it as a panacea or as useless, neither of which sees it as an essential component both of good health and of the ability to fight disease.

Confront most doctors on this issue and they will agree that nutrition is key. But getting doctors to engage with nutrition as a science and to implement it in patient management is another issue. They become confused. Where they accept that nutrients are not medicines, even when they bring health to a diseased body, they cannot bring themselves to dispense appropriate nutrients, arguing either that this will encourage dependence, or that food and nutrition are a private issue, and if handed out, should be cheap. Ironically, where doctors believe that nutrients are in fact treatments, there are incessant demands for clinical trials, designed around drug trial protocols, to prove the obvious that nutrition is good for you.

Drum Beat aims to generate discussion, and there has certainly been plenty of that. Most of it is focussed on HIV/AIDS, but there does seem to be a recognition that good nutrition is good for people, and good nutrition requires agricultural biodiversity: end of story.

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Making grains relevant

The low-carb craze of a few years back has spoiled the nutritional reputation of cereal grains, and it is up to the industry to get people eating them again. So said Francesco Pantò of the pasta giant Barilla yesterday at the first European congress of the American Association of Cereal Chemists International (AACCI), in Montpellier. He suggested five ways to do that:

  1. develop new durum wheat varieties and special products that can differentiate them, as for grapes and wine
  2. market grains as mainstream and everyday products
  3. use innovative technology to incorporate new grains into familiar products
  4. aim for convenience, and promote the goodness of cereals and fiber
  5. add extra components to cereal products in order to make them into a more complete meal

The first of these will of course be particularly welcome by those of us interested in agricultural biodiversity, and I wonder whether pseudocereals like buckwheat and quinoa might also find a place under the third point.