Nutrition

Proper nutrition improves children’s health and the quality of their lives for years to come.

Access to proper nutrition helps fight off illness and disease and is vital to children’s cognitive development and learning. It helps ensure that children grow up to become productive members of society.

Two billion people in the developing world suffer from diets lacking essential vitamins and minerals.

Foods rich in vitamins and minerals are essential for a healthy diet. When diets do not contain sufficient amounts of vitamin A, folic acid, iodine, iron, and zinc, the consequences include significantly lower birth weight, a decrease in cognitive development, and increased susceptibility to other diseases.

The most critical time for addressing children’s nutrition is conception through 24 months of age.

Almost one in five babies in developing countries is born with a low birth weight, partly because of the poor nutritional status of his or her mother. These children are two to 10 times more likely to die than normal weight infants and are at higher risk of developing non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as adults.

We’re working to improve diets of people in the developing world and ensure proper nutrition for young children.

We have two primary goals:

• Ensure that the diets of people in the developing world include essential vitamins and minerals.
• Ensure proper nutrition during pregnancy and for children through 24 months of age.

Our work in nutrition impacts many of the health issues we address at the foundation and is central to our success.

Next: Our Approach

Poor nutrition is a large and complex issue, and no single action can solve it. To address it, we’re supporting the following strategies:

Close key gaps in the understanding of poor nutrition and how to treat it.

We’re supporting research efforts to:

• Better understand the prevalence of poor nutrition and the biology behind it.
• Develop new ways to diagnose and address the issues.
• Find new approaches for supplying young children with necessary micronutrients—vitamins or minerals needed in small quantities for normal growth—and for reducing stunted growth.

Accelerate the development and production of fortified foods and provide access to them.

Fortifying staple foods and condiments with nutrients is a practical and cost-effective way to improve nutrition. Our partners are developing and testing new fortified products and ensuring access to them. As a direct result, fortified cooking oil is now available in Bangladesh and fortified wheat is available in parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Promote breastfeeding and provide access to complementary foods.

Breastfeeding is an important and cost-effective way to reduce nutritional deficiencies and boost weight gain in young children. That’s why we’re supporting efforts to improve breastfeeding rates. We also support work to expand access to fortified foods that complement breastfeeding and encourage mothers to feed them to their children who are weaning.

Reduce low birth weight.

Each year, 13 million infants are born with low birth weight—the result of poor nutrition before and during pregnancy—and this is the cause of half of all newborn deaths. We support research to better understand how to reduce low birth weight and improve infant nutrition and survival. Higher birth weights increase chance of infant survival.

Develop crops with higher levels of nutrients.

We’re supporting efforts to develop new varieties of staple crops with higher levels of key vitamins and minerals. For example:

• In Mozambique and Uganda, we’re supporting the development of a vitamin-rich sweet potato that will eventually be eaten in 150,000 farm households.
• In Congo, Rwanda, Niger, and India, we’re funding efforts to make high-iron and -zinc varieties of millet available in markets.

We also support the development of financing strategies and distribution methods critical to ensuring that these crops will be accessible to those who need them most.

Advocate for comprehensive global and country-led nutrition solutions.

Countrywide nutrition programs are desperately needed to address the issues of poor nutrition. We’re advocating at global and national levels for such programs. We’re working with partners, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Center for Global Development, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), to assess the problems and to advocate for change.