Women are the key human ingredient to adequate diets for families. Their voices must be heard and heeded
As the World Food Prize laureate, Ms Catherine Bertini, states: Women eat last. In almost every society in the world, women gather the food, prepare the food, serve the food. Yet most of the time, women eat last. A woman feeds her husband, her children, and finally — with whatever is left — she feeds herself. Even pregnant women and breast-feeding women often eat last when they should eat first.
Twenty years after the Fourth World Conference on Women, it is not just the household pecking order for food consumption that is a concern, but also the invisibility of women when it comes to policymaking at every level: From the household, to the community, to the private sector, to research, to local, regional, and national Governments, women are the key human ingredient to adequate diets for families. As such, their voices should be sought after, listened to, and acted upon.
Adequate nutrition depends on a well-balanced diet. For those who can afford almost no food — the 795 million people who, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, are chronically undernourished — the struggle to obtain any food is a daily challenge. For the rest of the world, including the very poor, eating the ‘right’ balance of foods is key. In fact, the word ‘malnutrition’ has taken on an expanded meaning. Its use no longer connotes only those who have too little to eat, but also those who consume too much or lack dietary balance. In other words, an obese person is also ‘malnourished’.
Obesity is growing in virtually every region in the world. It has fast become a major source of the world's most widespread diseases, commonly called noncommunicable diseases, including high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, liver disease, and sleep disorders. NCDs are now the leading cause of human death in the world.
There are now almost as many people worldwide who are obese (600 million) as are chronically undernourished (795 million). It won't be many years until those numbers intersect; obesity rates are dramatically rising while under-nourishment rates are gradually decreasing, even as the global population increases. Some of the most dramatic growth in obesity rates is among children under five years of age. For instance, between 2000 and 2013, the prevalence of overweight children under five in southern Africa rose from one per cent to 19 per cent.
There are many reasons behind these trends, including increased consumption of overly processed foods that add sugars and salts in place of nutrients, over-consumption of food generally, and lack of dietary variety (most commonly manifested as too few fruits and vegetables and too much starch). Some of these factors stem from poverty. In order to maximise the amount of food she has available to feed her family, a poor mother might buy cheaper foods that are higher in starch: Potatoes, rice, and flour-based breads. In metropolitan India, cheaper foods may also mean large bottles of sugary drinks. It seldom means more fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are not only more expensive than processed foods, they are also less readily available to consumers. Their perishability causes huge shifts in availability and cost in countries where refrigeration technology is minimal. For a few weeks, the market is swamped with a certain vegetable or fruit, causing the price to drop; later, availability is scarce and the price is high.
Back to the pregnant woman: While culture and society, not to mention household priorities, should ensure that she has enough of the right foods to eat, she still too often does not. Developed countries are taking action to address this discrepancy. For example, the US created the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children in 1974 to support the nutritional needs of poor pregnant mothers and their infants and toddlers through distribution of specific foods and nutrition education. It is considered the most effective national nutrition programme.
The World Health Organization has concluded that “Exclusive breast-feeding — defined as the practice of only giving an infant breast milk for the first six months of life — has the single largest potential impact on child mortality of any preventive intervention.” A multi-year, multi-country WHO study proved that infant growth outcomes are similar whether the mother is from Norway or Ghana, as long as the mother receives adequate nutrition herself.
The most critical period in the development of a human is from her time in utero until age two (some experts say age five). This is the period when she grows physically and intellectually, when her cells are multiplying fastest. Without adequate nutrition, which comes from her mother, during this period she, will be stunted in some way, and she can never make up the loss in later years. The lack of physical and/or intellectual capacity caused by lack of food and nutrition in early childhood impacts a person's economic well-being for life. And if a stunted young woman becomes pregnant while she still has an inadequate diet, she will give birth to a child who, if he survives, will be stunted himself. Thus, malnutrition perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
The recent International Food Policy Research Institute report Women's Empowerment and Nutrition tells us that nearly half of the decreases in children underweight between 1970 and 1995 have been due to the empowerment of women, as measured through improvements in women's education. For example, the Helen Keller International Program in Burkina Faso found that educating women in farming households via women extension agents led to increased dietary diversity and decreased wasting, anemia, and diarrhoea among the women and their children.