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    Home  >  Mother and Child Nutrition

 

Mother and Child Nutrition

Nutrition is a fundamental pillar of human life, health and development across the entire life span. From the earliest stages of fetal development, at birth, and through infancy, childhood, adolescence and on into adulthood, proper food and good nutrition are essential for survival, physical growth, mental development, performance, productivity, health and well-being.

More than half of all child deaths are associated with malnutrition, which weakens the body's resistance to illness. Poor diet, frequent illness, and inadequate or inattentive care of young children can lead to malnutrition.

If a woman is malnourished during pregnancy, or if her child is malnourished during the first two years of life, the child's physical and mental growth and development may be slowed. This cannot be made up when the child is older – it will affect the child for the rest of his or her life.

Children have the right to a caring, protective environment and to nutritious food and basic health care to protect them from illness and promote growth and development.

 

Deaths among children aged 28 days to 5 years - 6.6 million/year

Child deaths: Causes and epidemiological dimensions
Robert E. Black, M.D., M.P.H.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Full text at The Lancet


 

Progress For Children: A Report Card on Nutrition

 

Diarrhoea is an important cause of undernutrition. This is because nutrient requirements are increased during diarrhoea, as during other infectious diseases, whereas nutrient intake and absorption are usually decreased. Each episode of diarrhoea can cause weight loss and growth faltering. Moreover, if diarrhoea occurs frequently, there may be too little time to "catch up" on growth between episodes, the result being a flattening of the normal growth curve. Children who experience frequent episodes of acute diarrhoea, or have persistent diarrhoea, are more likely to become undernourished than children who experience fewer or shorter episodes of diarrhoea. In general, the impact of diarrhoea on nutritional status is proportional to the number of days a child spends with diarrhoea each year.

In turn, undernutrition contributes to the problem of diarrhoea. In children who are undernourished as a result of inadequate feeding, previous diarrhoeal episodes, or both, acute diarrhoeal episodes are more severe, longer lasting, and probably more frequent; persistent diarrhoea is also more frequent and dysentery is more severe. The risk of dying from an episode of persistent diarrhoea or dysentery is considerably increased when a child is already undernourished. In general, these effects are proportional to the degree of undernutrition, being greatest when undernutrition is severe.

Thus, diarrhoea and undernutrition combine to form a vicious circle which, if it is not broken, can eventually result in death; the final event may be a particularly severe or prolonged episode of diarrhoea or, when severe undernutrition is present, another serious infection such as pneumonia. Deaths from diarrhoea are, in fact, usually associated with undernutrition. In hospitals where good management of dehydration is practised, virtually all mortality from diarrhoea is in undernourished children.

Diarrhoea is, in reality, as much a nutritional disease as one of fluid and electrolyte imbalance, and therapy is not adequate unless both aspects of the disease are treated. However, in contrast to fluid replacement, nutritional management of diarrhoea requires good feeding practices both during the illness and between episodes of diarrhoea, when the child is not sick. When this is done, and undernutrition is either prevented or corrected, the risk of death from a future episode of diarrhoea is greatly reduced.

 

Infant and Young Child Feeding and Nutrition

Feeding is a critical aspect of caring for infants and young children. Appropriate feeding practices stimulate bonding with the caregiver and psycho-social development. They lead to improved nutrition and physical growth, reduced susceptibility to common childhood infections and better resistance to cope with them. Improved health outcomes in young children have long-lasting health effects throughout the life-span, including increased performance and productivity, and reduced risk of certain non-communicable diseases.

Child Feeding and Nutrition ( 2-5 years age )

Malnutrition contributes to more than half of all childhood deaths, although it is rarely listed as the direct cause. For most children, lack of access to food is not the only cause of malnutrition. Poor feeding practices and infection, or a combination of the two, are both major factors of malnutrition. Infection – particularly frequent or persistent diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria – undermines nutritional status. Poor feeding practices, such as inadequate breastfeeding, offering the wrong foods, giving insufficient quantities, and not ensuring that the child gets enough food, contribute to malnutrition.

Malnourished children are, in turn, more vulnerable to disease and the vicious circle is established.

Improved feeding practices to prevent or treat malnutrition could save 800,000 lives per year.

  • Counselling for mothers and caretakers

  • Micronutrient supplements

  • Management of severe malnutrition

Adolescent Nutrition

Adolescence represents a window of opportunity to prepare for a healthy adult life. During adolescence, nutritional problems originating earlier in life can potentially be corrected, in addition to addressing current ones. It is also a timely period to shape and consolidate healthy eating and lifestyle behaviours, thereby preventing or postponing the onset of nutrition-related chronic diseases in adulthood.

As adolescents have a low prevalence of infections such as pneumonia and gastroenteritis compared with younger children, and of chronic disease compared with ageing people, they have generally been given little health and nutrition attention, except for reproductive health concerns. However, there are nutritional issues, which are adolescent-specific, and which call for specific strategies and approaches.

The main issues in adolescent nutrition are:

  • Micronutrient deficiencies (iron deficiency and anaemia)

  • Malnutrition and stunting

  • Obesity and other nutrition-related chronic diseases

  • Adolescents eating patterns and lifestyles

  • Nutrition in relation to early pregnancy

 

Nutrition Resources

WHO Resources
 

Nutrition for Health and Development (NHD)

Reproductive Health and Research (RHR

UNAIDS

 

General

Planning

Guidelines and Training

Monitoring and Evaluation

Research


 

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20 April, 2008top of page