Food fortification with folic acid: has the other shoe dropped?

Folic acid (FA) supplementation effectively reduces the rates of children born with neural tube defects (NTDs). Currently, 42 nations practice mandatory FA fortification to combat NTD. In addition to NTD, FA fortification may also have salutary effects on the incidence of orofacial cleft birth defects and have secondary benefits in reducing serum homocysteine concentrations and stroke mortality.

Weaning infants with malnutrition, including HIV.

A normal pregnancy and adequate lactation performance should produce at 6 months of life a healthy baby, who has a weight and height within the limits of international growth norms. When that does not happen and the child is either too small (or too big), i.e.

Contribution of a novel high-density micronutrient condiment (HDMC) to nutrient adequacy of home-prepared Guatemalan dishes.

Background: The diet of low-income Guatemalan populations is mostly plant-based, deficient in some vitamins and minerals, and rich in antinutritional compounds that reduce the bioavailability of several micronutrients. Objective. To describe the manner in which low-income Guatemalan women in rural and urban settings would prepare dishes for main meals using a high-density multimicronutrient condiment (HDMC) and to compare the nutrient density and contribution to the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of the dishes with and without added HDMC.

Programme and policy issues related to promoting positive early nutritional influences to prevent obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease in later life: a developing countries view.

Public health policy differs from programme insofar as the former is the expression of goals at a higher decision-making level (international, regional, national or provincial) and the latter involves the execution of intervention measures at the community or individual level. It has recently become fashionable to speak of "evidence-based" policy. There is now ample evidence to suggest that early nutritional influences on chronic disease risk in later life are contributing to the acceleration of the overall worldwide epidemic of obesity and non-transmissible diseases.

Public health nutrition in Latin America.

An inquiry into options for Masters-level training and into attitudes and perceptions among a convenience sample of nutrition students and professionals from 11 countries suggests that the term, "Public Health Nutrition", as such, is poorly represented and poorly understood in the Latin American region. At least six countries (Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico) at seven sites have Masters programs to provide training for nutrition in a public health context or public health with an emphasis in nutrition. Exploring alliances from the Americas with the formal PHN discipline emerging in Europe should enrich the mutual perspective on curriculum design.

Alleviation of vitamin A deficiency with palm fruit and its products.

The decreased dietary diversity wrought from the adoption of the settled, agrarian system to replace the hunter-gather and pastoralist lifestyles assured a stable supply of protein and calories from grains and tubers while creating a vulnerability for humans to suffer micronutrient deficiencies. The vitamin A from animal tissue is more bioavailable to humans than the provitamin A in the matrix of green plants. Provitamin A carotenes achieve a dietary vitamin A efficacy nearly equivalent to that of the preformed vitamin only in the context of an oily matrix.

Diet and long-term health: an African Diaspora perspective.

The life-stage approach, which views the behaviours and exposures of an individual from the preconceptual situation of the parent through pregnancy, infancy, childhood and adolescence, and into the advancing years through adulthood, is the basis of analysis of strategies to improve long-term health. Among the behaviours of note is the dietary selection pattern, conditioning our exposure to nutrients and dietary constituents that influences growth, nutriture, cognitive and physical performance, and disease resistance and susceptibility. The African Diaspora created a population displaced from Africa to the Western Hemisphere as part of the African slave trade from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Dietary assessment tools for developing countries for use in multi-centric, collaborative protocols.

In recent years, increasing interest in the format of multi-centric studies among different populations in developing nations has evolved in the field of health surveys and epidemiology. Dietary intake data are most often part of these cross-cultural and cross-national collaborative efforts. Various questions have been raised about the appropriate endeavours for dietetics and nutritional sciences in developing societies, the instruments available for application, and the pitfalls and caveats in their use.

Fermentation, fermented foods and lactose intolerance.

Lactose (milk sugar) is a fermentable substrate. It can be fermented outside of the body to produce cheeses, yoghurts and acidified milks. It can be fermented within the large intestine in those people who have insufficient expression of lactase enzyme on the intestinal mucosa to ferment this disaccharide to its absorbable, simple hexose sugars: glucose and galactose.

Nutrition and the extremes of life: dilemmas and enigmas of advanced old age.

Pre-term infants born four months before term have a very low birth weight; in an evolutionary sense, they were never 'meant' to survive through the evolutionary period preceding the technological age. In the same way, evolution failed to contemplate survival to ages 50, 60, 70 and beyond. Because peak reproductive performance comes before the vagaries of a given individual's survival is determined, and the fact of that survival conveys no advantage to disseminating the genetic make-up, natural selection cannot select for advantages related to longevity.

Modulation of the immune system and the response against pathogens with bovine colostrum concentrates.

The growth, development and health conditions for children living under deprived conditions in developing countries are so adverse that immediate public health measures to reduce morbidity and improve nutrition are urgently needed. Preventing and shortening the course of diarrhoeal episodes, eliminating protozoal colonization, and balancing intestinal microflora would all contribute to these goals. The consumption by humans of part of the colostrum produced when a dairy animal gives birth is an established tradition in many traditional societies.

Methods for the measurement of nutrition impact and adaptation of laboratory methods into field settings to enhance and support community-based nutrition research.

International nutrition will become increasingly concerned with evaluation of nutritional status at the community level to diagnose situations of risk for nutrient deficits and excesses, and to monitor the impact of remedial interventions. Advances in biologic concepts and technology (particularly miniaturization of assays) are assisting the creation of noninvasive, robust, and acceptable diagnostic tests of nutritional status for field settings. As with more complex and formal assays, the principles of accuracy, reliability, and construct validity need to be applied.

Malnutrition and excess mortality in Shangri-La.

Populations living at high altitude in the Tibetan highlands suffer extraordinarily high rates of maternal mortality, infant and juvenile mortality, and infectious morbidity. Poverty and living condition, more than altitude, contribute to the adverse statistics. The traditional nomadic herders are the most affected among the residents.

Demographic and nutritional trends among the elderly in developed and developing regions.

Aging for an individual and aging for a population are related but not the same. For an individual, aging first involves survival to more advanced years, which will inevitably be accompanied by progressive changes in the structure and function of somatic tissues due to a programmed failure of the organism maximally to invest in their maintenance. For a population, aging means an increase in the median age, a dual function of longer survival of individuals and a decrease in fertility.

Plant-based diets are traditional in developing countries: 21st century challenges for better nutrition and health.

The chronic degenerative diseases were virtually unknown in original hunter-gatherer societies. At the dawn of the 21st century, however, they represent the most important public health challenge to populations of both the industrialized, affluent nations of the temperate zones and the low-income developing countries of the tropics. The developing countries most closely reflect the legacy of our traditional foreparents while constituting threequarters of the world's populace and public health interest.

Bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy in health and disease. Correspondence between whole body and segmental bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy indices in patients with classical dengue fever.

Bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy (BIS) can provide estimates of body composition for both whole body (WB) and body segments (BS). In normal, healthy subjects, BS measurements may be expected to serve as surrogates for WB indices; however, very little is known about this correspondence in people suffering from acute illnesses. The aim of this study was to evaluate the degree of this correspondence in patients with an acute, systemic illness, such as classical dengue fever.

Plant sources of vitamin A and human nutriture: how much is still too little?

In a randomized controlled 12-week feeding trial among malnourished, anemic, and largely vitamin A-deficient Ghanaian preschool children, the hypothesis that the ability of provitamin A carotenoids in dark green, leafy vegetables (DGLV) to raise vitamin A status in different formats--with or without fat and with fat plus anthelmintic treatment for intestinal worms--was tested by comparison with a low vitamin A fare and with pure chemical beta-carotene. The 12-week increments in retinol concentrations over baseline ranged from 5% to 44%, but over half of the DGLV-fed population had persistently low circulating retinol. The very modest impact on vitamin A status of these maneuvers to optimize dietary use of provitamin A in DGLV has major implications for public policy to eradicate hypovitaminosis A.

The plasma beta-carotene response to a single meal of carrots in Guatemalan schoolchildren.

Plasma samples were obtained before, and 8 and 24 h after the ingestion of an ad libitum amount of cooked carrots by 23 school children from a peri-urban community in Guatemala City. The single-meal consumption of cooked carrots ranged from a low 122 g to a high of 961 g (mean: 370.5 +/- 237.

Plant sources of vitamin A and human nutrition: red palm oil does the job.

Studies in India demonstrate that the beta-carotene in red palm oil is as effective as high-dose retinyl palmitate as a supplement to restore and preserve vitamin A nutriture in schoolchildren and may be an effective food-based strategy to combat hypovitaminosis A.

Slow-release iodine in local water supplies reverses iodine deficiency disorders: is it worth its salt?

An alternative approach to supplying iodine to isolated populations through the use of slow-release iodine in silicone matrices that float in the water supply was tested in remote desert areas of the Sudan. There was a differential impact, as judged by indicators of iodine nutriture, and these indicators provided varying indications of the iodine status of the population.