One in three children under five don’t get proper nutrition: UN

PARIS: A third of the world’s nearly 700 million children under five years old are undernourished or overweight and face lifelong health problems as a consequence, according to a grim UN assessment of childhood nutrition released on Tuesday.

“If children eat poorly, they live poorly,” said Unicef executive director Henrietta Fore, unveiling the fund’s first State of the World’s Children report since 1999. “We are losing ground in the fight for healthy diets.”

Problems that once existed at opposite ends of the wealth spectrum have today converged in poor and middle-income countries, the report showed.

Despite a nearly 40% drop from 1990 to 2015 of stunting in poor countries, 149 million children four or younger are today still too short for their age, a clinical condition that impairs both brain and body development.

Another 50 million are afflicted by wasting, a chronic and debilitating thinness also born of poverty. At the same time, half of youngsters across the globe under five are not getting essential vitamins and minerals, a long-standing problem Unicef has dubbed “hidden hunger”. Over the last three decades, however, another form of child malnutrition has surged across the developing world: excess weight.

“This triple burden - undernutrition, lack of micronutrients, obesity - is increasingly found in the same country, sometimes in the same neighbourhood, and often in the same household,” Victor Aguayo, head of Unicef’s nutrition programme, told AFP.

Across all age groups, more than 800 million people in the world are constantly hungry and another two billion are eating too much of the wrong foods, driving epidemics of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Among children under five, diet during first 1,000 days after conception is the foundation for physical health and mental development.

Yet, only two in five infants under six months are exclusively breastfed, as recommended.