Category: Nutrition

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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.

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Are Kenyans ignoring diversity of diet?

A long press release from Tufts University in Boston, USA, tells us how faculty members have assisted Kenyan policy-makers in a series of workshops

“to build strategies for implementing Kenya’s National Food and Nutrition Policy. … The scope of the plan ranges from agricultural production, strategic grain reserves, and post-harvest protection, to nutritional interventions for high-risk groups, and the interrelationship of nutrition and diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.”

But I see no mention whatsoever of either dietary diversity or the value of local species as a contribution to nutrition. I’m hoping this is just an oversight by whoever wrote the release, but I fear it may not be. Using local food diversity to boost dietary diversity has so many benefits, I can’t imagine how the team overlooked it.

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Kids eat more if fruit and veg are home-grown

A survey in the US has discovered that children eat more fruit and vegetables, and have a more positive attitude to those foods, if they have been grown in a home garden. That’s great, for children at homes with gardens. For the rest, school gardens can help:

“Students at schools with gardens learn about math and science and they also eat more fruits and vegetables. Kids eat healthier and they know more about eating healthy. It’s a winning and low-cost strategy to improve the nutrition of our children at a time when the pediatric obesity is an epidemic problem.”

I happen to think a garden is one of the finest teaching aides ever, but then, I’m biased.