Proper nutrition is a powerful good: people who are well nourished are more likely to be healthy, productive and able to learn. Good nutrition benefits families, their communities and the world as a whole.
Undernutrition is, by the same logic, devastating. It blunts the intellect, saps the productivity of everyone it touches and perpetuates poverty.
Stunting - or low height for age - traps people into a lifelong cycle of poor nutrition, illness, poverty and inequity. The damage to physical and cognitive development, especially during the first two years of a child’s life, is largely irreversible. A child’s poorer school performance results in future income reductions of up to 22 per cent on average. As adults, they are also at increased risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) period from birth to two years of age is the “critical window” for the promotion of good growth, health, and behavioral and cognitive developmentmothers are empowered to initiate breastfeeding within one hour of birth, breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and continue to breastfeed for two years or more, together with nutritionally adequate, safe, age appropriate, responsive complementary feeding starting at six months. Maternal nutrition is also important for ensuring good nutrition status of the infant as well as safeguarding women's health.
. The Deadly Opposition to Genetically Modified Food
Vitamin A deficiency has killed 8 million kids in the last 12 years. Help is finally on the way.
By Bjørn Lomborg nally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?
Golden rice is the most prominent example