The following is the annual report of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition for the fiscal year 2021 starting October 2020 through September 2021 (Yr11).
Background: The public health burden of undernutrition remains heavy and widespread, especially in low-income countries like Nepal. While predictors of undernutrition are well documented, few studies have examined the effects of political will and quality of policy or program implementation on child growth.
People in fragile environments face various shocks that negatively affect their nutrition. Many governments put policy mechanisms in place to promote recovery of households after adverse shocks; however, resilience is difficult to measure because some apparent recovery could be the result of statistical randomness and reversion to trends. This paper demonstrates a new approach to measuring nutritional resilience in a population.
Maternal depression has been associated with adverse child growth and development; less is known about its relation to children's diet. In a cross-sectional study embedded at endline of a longitudinal community development intervention, mothers of 629 children (age 23–66 months) in rural Nepal responded to household and children's diet questionnaires and were screened for depression. Child anthropometry and development (Ages and Stages Questionnaire) were assessed.
Background
The WHO-UNICEF minimum dietary diversity (MDD) indicator for children aged 6–23 months is a global monitoring indicator used to track multi-year population-level changes in dietary quality, but the influence of seasonality on MDD estimates remains unclear.
Objective
Examine how seasonality of data collection may influence population-level MDD estimates and inferences about MDD change over multiple survey years.
Methods
Background
Anemia is an etiologically heterogeneous condition affecting over half of preschool-aged children in South Asia. An urgent need exists to elucidate context-specific causes of anemia to effectively address this issue.
Objective
This study investigated national trends and stability in the prevalence of child anemia and associated risk factors from 2013–2016.
Design
The value of animal-sourced foods (ASFs) in providing key nutrients, particularly for child growth and where diets are of low quality, is understood mainly from cross-sectional assessment of current consumption. Longitudinal panel data from Nepal, Bangladesh and Uganda were used here to assess associations among previous (lagged) and contemporaneous ASF intake with linear growth of children aged 6–24 months.
Aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) is the hydroxylated metabolite of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) formed in the liver of mammals and subsequently excreted in breastmilk (BM) of mammals. Humans are exposed to AFM1 mainly through the consumption of aflatoxin contaminated milk and foods. Determining levels of AFM1 is of significant public health importance due to the risk of exposure to breastfeeding infants. The objective of this study is to determine the prevalence of AFM1 in BM and assess factors associated with BM AFM1 levels in mothers.
Nutritional status has important implications for labor productivity, lifetime earnings, and country-wide economic development. Dietary diversity is an important contributor to nutrition.
To identify how patterns of food consumption are related to dietary diversity and to measure the potential for policy interventions to influence diet complexity.
Dietary diversity can play an important role in providing essential nutrients for both mother and fetus during pregnancy. This study aimed to assess the factors associated with dietary diversity during pregnancy in the western hill region of Nepal.