Poor Diets Damaging Children’s Health Worldwide- UNICEF

BY ANIN AGYEI–

Photo Credit: Afrikanews

NEW AFRICA BUSINESS NEWS, Accra, Ghana- ACCORDING TO the United Nations International Emergency Fund (UNICEF) an alarmingly high number of children are suffering the consequences of poor diets and a food system that is failing them.

UNICEF made these statement at the State of the World’s Children 2019: Children, Food and Nutrition summit finds that at least 1 in 3 children under five or over 200 million – is either undernourished or overweight.

In Ghana, close to one in every five children under 5 years is stunted while one in every ten children under 5 is underweight.

The report suggest that almost 2 in 3 children between six months and two years of age are not fed food that supports their rapidly growing bodies and brains. This puts them at risk of poor brain development, weak learning, low immunity, increased infections and in many cases, death.

The Executive Director of UNICEF, Ms Henrietta Fore said “despite all the technological, cultural and social advances of the last few decades, we have lost sight of this most basic fact: If children eat poorly, they live poorly.”

“Millions of children subsist on an unhealthy diet because they simply do not have a better choice. The way we understand and respond to malnutrition needs to change: It is not just about getting children enough to eat; it is above all about getting them the right food to eat. That is our common challenge today.”

The report provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of 21^st century child malnutrition in all its forms. It describes a triple burden of malnutrition: Under nutrition, hidden hunger caused by a lack of essential nutrients, and overweight among children under the age of five, noting that around the world:

It revealed that 149 million children are stunted, or too short for their age, 50 million children are wasted, or too thin for their height, 340 million children – or 1 in 2 suffer from deficiencies in essential vitamins and nutrients such as vitamin A and iron and 40 million children are overweight or obese.

The report warns that poor eating and feeding practices start from the earliest days of a child’s life. Though breastfeeding can save lives, for example, only 42% of children under six months of age are exclusively breastfed and an increasing number of children are fed infant formula.

Recent reports from the Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) however show that, the number of Ghanaian children exclusively breastfed which used to be at 52% has declined and is now at 43%.

Sales of milk-based formula grew by 72% between 2008 and 2013 in upper middle-income countries such as Brazil, China and Turkey, largely due to inappropriate marketing and weak policies and programmes to protect, promote and support breastfeeding.

As children begin transitioning to soft or solid foods around the six-month mark, too many are introduced to the wrong kind of diet, according to the report. Worldwide, close to 45 per cent of children between six months and two years of age are not fed any fruits or vegetables. Nearly 60 per cent do not eat any eggs, dairy, fish or meat.

As children grow older, their exposure to unhealthy food becomes alarming, driven largely by inappropriate marketing and advertising, the abundance of ultra-processed foods in cities but also in remote areas, and increasing access to fast food and highly sweetened beverages.

For example, the report shows that 42% of school-going adolescents in low- and middle-income countries consume carbonated sugary soft drinks at least once a day and 46% eat fast food at least once a week. Those rates go up to 62% and 49%, respectively, for adolescents in high-income countries.

As a result, overweight and obesity levels in childhood and adolescence are increasing worldwide. From 2000 to 2016, the proportion of overweight children between 5 and 19 years of age doubled from 1 in 10 to almost 1 in 5. Ten times more girls and 12 times more boys in this age group suffer from obesity today than in 1975.

The greatest burden of malnutrition in all its forms is shouldered by children and adolescents from the poorest and most marginalized communities, the report notes.

Only 1 in 5 children aged six months to two years from the poorest households eats a sufficiently diverse diet for healthy growth. Even in high-income countries such as the UK, the prevalence of overweight is more than twice as high in the poorest areas as in the richest areas.

In Ghana also, only 24% of children within that age bracket eat diverse foods, indeed for the group that is most vulnerable to malnutrition, the number of children introduced to the minimum number of diverse foods is very low.

The report also notes that climate-related disasters cause severe food crises. Drought, for example, is responsible for 80 per cent of damage and losses in agriculture, dramatically altering what food is available to children and families, as well as the quality and price of that food.

To address this growing malnutrition crisis in all its forms, UNICEF is issuing an urgent appeal to governments, the private sector, donors, parents, families and businesses to help children grow healthy by; empowering families, children and young people to demand nutritious food, including by improving nutrition education and using proven legislation such as sugar taxes to reduce demand for unhealthy foods, driving food suppliers to do the right thing for children, by incentivizing the provision of healthy, convenient and affordable foods and building healthy food environments for children and adolescents by using proven approaches, such as accurate and easy-to-understand labelling and stronger controls on the marketing of unhealthy foods.

Other they identified includes, mobilising supportive systems – health, water and sanitation, education and social protection – to scale up nutrition results for all children and collecting, analysing and using good-quality data and evidence to guide action and track progress. UNICEF

BY ANIN AGYEI, NEW AFRICA BUSINESS NEWS, AFRICA CORRESPONDENT

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