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Unexpected effects of nutrition
In the late 1960s, a team of researchers began distributing a nutritional supplement to families with young children ∈ rural Guatemala. They were testing the assumption that providing enough protein ∈ the first few years of life would reduce the incidence of stunted growth.
It did. Children who received added nutrition grew 1 to 2 centimetres taller than those ∈a control group. But the benefits didn’t stop there. These children went on to score higher on reading and knowledge tests as adolescents, and when researchers returned ∈ the early 2000s, women who had received the supplements ∈ the first three years of life completed more years of schooling and men had higher incomes.
“Had there not been these follow-ups, this study probably would have been largely forgotten,” says Reynaldo Martorell, a specialist ∈ maternal and child nutrition who led the followup studies. Instead, he says, the findings made financial institutions such as the World Bank think of early nutritional interventions as long-term investments ∈ human health. Since the Guatemalan research, studies around the world — ∈Brazil, Peru, Jamaica, the Philippines, Kenya and Zimbabwe — have all associated poor or stunted growth ∈ young children with lower cognitive test scores and worse school achievement. A picture slowly emerged that being too short early ∈ life is a sign of adverse conditions — such as poor diet and regular episodes of diarrhea — and a predictor for intellectual deficits and mortality.
(Carina Storrs. www.nature.com, 12.07.2017. Adaptado.)
The study carried out ∈ rural Guatemala aimed at
