High on ease, low on nutrition: instant-noodle diet harms Asian kids

A diet heavy on cheap, modern food like instant noodles that fills bellies but lacks key nutrients has left millions of children unhealthily thin or overweight in Southeast Asia, experts say.

The Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia have booming economies and rising standards of living, yet many working parents do not have the time, money or awareness to

steer clear of food hurting their kids.

In those three nations, an average of 40 percent of children aged five and below is malnourished, higher than the global average of one-in-three, according to a report out Tuesday from UNICEF, the UN children’s agency.

“Parents believe that filling their children’s stomach is the most important thing. They don’t really think about an adequate intake of protein, calcium or fiber,” Hasbullah Thabrany, a public health expert in Indonesia, told AFP.

UNICEF said the harm done to children is both a symptom of past deprivation and a predictor of future poverty, while iron deficiency impairs a child’s ability to learn and raises a woman’s risk of death during or shortly after childbirth.

To give some sense of scale to the problem, Indonesia had 24.4 million children under five last year, while the Philippines had 11 million and Malaysia 2.6 million, UNICEF data show.

Mueni Mutunga, UNICEF Asia nutrition specialist, traced the trend back to families ditching traditional diets for affordable, accessible and easy-to-prepare “modern” meals.

“Noodles are easy. Noodles are cheap. Noodles are quick and an easy substitute for what should have been a balanced diet,” she told AFP.

‘Poverty is key’

The noodles, which cost as little as 23 US cents a packet in Manila, are low on essential nutrients and micronutrients like iron and are also protein-deficient while having high fat and salt content, Mutunga added.

Indonesia was the world’s second-biggest consumer of instant noodles, behind China, with 12.5 billion servings in 2018, according to the World Instant Noodles Association.

The figure is more than the total consumed by India and Japan put together.

Nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables, eggs, dairy, fish and meat are disappearing from diets as the rural population moves to the cities in search of jobs, the UNICEF report said.

Though the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are all considered middle-income countries by World Bank measures, tens of millions of their people struggle to make enough money to live.

“Poverty is the key issue,” said T. Jayabalan, a public health expert in Malaysia, adding that households where both parents work need quickly made meals.

Low-income households in Malaysia depend largely on ready-made noodles, sweet potatoes and soya-based products as their major meals, he said.

Undernourished or overweight

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 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 percent 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 longstanding 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, a lack of crucial micronutrients, obesity – is increasingly found in the same country, sometimes in the same neighborhood, and often in the same household,” Victor Aguayo, head of UNICEF’s nutrition program, told AFP.

“A mother who is overweight or obese can have children who are stunted or wasted.”

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.

‘Hidden hunger’

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

And yet, only two-in-five infants under six months are exclusively breastfed, as recommended. Sales of milk-based formula have risen worldwide by 40 percent, and in upper middle-income countries such as Brazil, China and Turkey by nearly threequarters.

Missing vitamins and minerals, meanwhile, can lead to compromised immune systems, poor sight and hearing defects. A lack of iron can cause anemia and reduced IQ.

“It’s ‘hidden’ because you don’t notice the impact until it is too late,” Brian Keeley, editor-in-chief of report, told AFP.

“You don’t notice that the child is running a little slower than everyone else,

struggling a bit in school.”

The rise of obesity, however, is plain to see.

The problem was virtually non-existent in poor countries 30 years ago, but today at least 10 percent of under five year olds are overweight or obese in three-quarters of low-income nations.

“There needs to be a focus on obesity before it is too late,” said Keeley. “Unless you deal with it in a preventative way, you’re going to struggle to fix it later on.”

Cheap, readily available junk food, often marketed directly to kids, has made the problem much worse.

“Children are eating too much of what they don’t need – salt, sugar and fat,” Keeley added.

Progress in fighting undernourishment will also be hampered by climate change, the report warned.

School lunches

Japan manages a rare feat for a developed country when it comes to feeding its children – high scores for nutrition but very low obesity rates. One major key? School lunches.

A landmark report by the UN’s children agency UNICEF released Tuesday shows Japan topping the charts for childhood health indicators, with low rates of infant mortality and few underweight children.

But it also manages the lowest incidence of childhood obesity among the 41 developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and European Union.

Experts say there are various factors at work, including a health-conscious society and regularly mandated check-ups for children, but a nationwide school lunch program also plays a key role.

“School lunches with menus that are created by nutritionists are provided to all primary schools and the majority of junior high schools throughout Japan,” Mitsuhiko Hara, a pediatrician and professor at Tokyo Kasei Gakuin University, told AFP.