Rio isn’t just about Olympics, nutrition is on the menu

This August, sports and nutrition go head-to-head in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Nutrition for Growth Summit holds August 4, a day before the opening ceremony of the Olympics – and it is the lives and well-being of children around the world on the table. Nigeria’s case isn’t a North-east or insurgency-fuelled problem, according to […]

This August, sports and nutrition go head-to-head in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Nutrition for Growth Summit holds August 4, a day before the opening ceremony of the Olympics – and it is the lives and well-being of children around the world on the table.
Nigeria’s case isn’t a North-east or insurgency-fuelled problem, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Two out of every three cases of severe malnutrition is in the north of the country, says Arjan de Vagt, nutrition officer for UNICEF.
“But only 16 percent of the entire cases of malnutrition is in [the three worst-affected states] Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. The rest is in the rest of the country,” added de Vagt.
“Some politicians think malnutrition is because of the IDP [internally displaced people] situation, because of the crisis. Malnutrition was there before Boko Haram. The crisis has made the situation more vulnerable, more serious,” the UNICEF official stated.
Up to 2.5 million children live with severe acute malnutrition and will require special feeding using ready-to-use therapeutic foods.
But de Vagt says funds available to UNICEF and its partners mean only 25 percent of children in need will get the therapeutic food, and one in five will die.
The deaths usually occur within a window of their first 1,000 days – the same period nutritionists say interventions should target.
“You have to intervene during pregnancy and up to the first two years. Most children that do die from malnutrition, that’s when they die,” said de Vagt.
Dr. David Olayemi, policy advisor for Save the Children, likens crumbling a paper and then trying to straighten it out until it is flat and smooth as before.
‘If we miss the opportunity of getting children well-nourished within the first 1,000 days of life, this is what we have done,” Olayemi said, holding up the crumpled paper. “Giving them school feeding or the best food after five years will not correct it.”
Experts in nutrition, under the Civil Society Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria, worry that the coverage and intensity of programmes to improve nutrition have been inadequate.
“We do a lot of discussion in clusters but the information needs to get to the community. It must be continuous,” said Olayemi.
President of Nutrition Society of Nigeria, Dr. Ngozi Nnam, said: “We are expecting that whatever intervention we have talked about, civil society groups should take it back to their organisation and try to send it back to the grassroots.”
Dr. Funmi Akinyele, executive director, Food Basket Foundation International, said: “If a woman is under-nourished and she has a child, then we are incurring new cases of malnutrition every day while we are trying to fight the old cases. What we need to do to contain the problem is prevent the new cases while we are fighting the old ones.”