Living by a forest diversifies kid’s micronutrient intake, study finds

17 Aug 2018 --- A global study has found that children who live near forests enjoy a better nutrition intake than those who live further away from them. The research, which was conducted across 27 developing countries, identified that children living by forests had at least 25 percent greater diversity in their diets compared to kids who did not. The study, published in Science Advances, notes particular nutrient increases with vitamin A and iron. The findings have the potential for actors attempting to lessen malnutrition through interventions such as fortification, by highlighting the benefit that could come from an integrated approach.

“We first looked at the wider metric of dietary diversity, which is a measurement of the types of different foods a child has eaten in the past 24 hours. This has been shown to be a good proxy for micronutrient intake. We took a closer look at foods rich in vitamin A and those rich in iron and found that households living closer to forests had much higher levels of intake of foods in these categories,” Brendan Fisher, a professor in UVM's Environmental Program in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a co-author on the research tells NutritionInsight.

The results turn on its head the common assumption that improving nutrition in poorer countries requires clearing forests for more farmland and, instead, suggest that forest conservation could be an important tool for aid agencies seeking to improve the nutrition of children.

“This work shows just how important forests are for people in food insecure areas,” Fisher adds.

“Conserving forests and other ecosystems can be very important for human health, particularly for the most vulnerable people. Forests deliver a whole host of benefits to people from carbon storage, fuel and non-timber products, biodiversity, water regulation, here we take some solid steps towards showing just how important forests are for diet and nutrition for people in some of the poorest countries in the world.”

The study
The new study, led by a team at the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Environment, examined data on children's diets from 43,000 households across four continents.

“This is a powerful, actionable result,” says Taylor Ricketts, Director of UVM's Gund Institute and senior author on the paper. “It's comparable to the impacts of some nutrition-focused agricultural programs.”

For example, the results of the new forest study are very similar to those of an effort to introduce a fortified sweet potato in drought-prone areas of Mozambique and of a homestead food production program in Cambodia. In other words, protecting forests could be a central piece in integrated efforts to promote better nutrition.

Essentially, the study reveals a global signal showing that forests can improve nutrition through numerous pathways. These include: providing a range of foods gathered in forests, benefits from wild pollinators that live in forests, income from forests products to buy food, and more productive use of mothers' time – all of which can promote greater dietary diversity.

By Laxmi Haigh