Read at :
http://ciatlibrary.blogspot.com/2010/06/tackling-malnutrition-with-food-not.html
Tackling malnutrition – with food, not pills
We’re sure you’ll be keen to read Michael Latham of Cornell University’s scathing comment piece, The great vitamin A fiasco, published in the first edition of the online journal World Nutrition recently.
The article is an extensive, critical account of how the international nutrition community has responded to worldwide vitamin A deficiency by focusing on distributing vitamin A supplements, to the detriment of other “biologically, socially, culturally, economically and environmentally appropriate” intervention approaches.
We’re sure some members of the international development community will find Latham’s hard-hitting analysis somewhat hard to swallow.
But he makes a very strong point which lends support to ongoing work by CIAT – that improving the nutritional quality of food is a smarter and often more effective option than the quick fix of reaching for the vitamin pills. As Latham himself points out, this view is also enshrined in the Declaration and Plan of Action from the 1992 UN International Conference on Nutrition, which recommends that member states “(e)nsure that sustainable food-based strategies are given first priority particularly for populations deficient in vitamin A and iron, favouring locally available foods and taking into account local food habits.”
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