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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 in rural Guatemala. They were testing the assumption that providing enough protein in 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 in 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 in the early 2000s, women who had received the supplements in 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 in 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 in human health. Since the Guatemalan research, studies around the world — in Brazil, Peru, Jamaica, the Philippines, Kenya and Zimbabwe — have all associated poor or stunted growth in young children with lower cognitive test scores and worse school achievement. A picture slowly emerged that being too short early in 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.)
What, according to the third paragraph, can work as a predictor for intellectual deficits and mortality?
