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Peanut butter offers
fresh hope to starving kids
Betsy Taylor
Friday, September 14, 2007
Researchers
may have a simple way to help feed
thousands of starving children in
Africa: peanut butter.
In a US professor's study,3,000
malnourished children were treated
with an enriched peanut-butter
mixture. Eighty-nine percent of the
severely malnourished children and
85 percent of the moderately
malnourished children recovered.
The recovery rate for children
given standard therapies is less
than 50 percent, researchers said in
the study published this summer in
Maternal and Child Nutrition.
The mixture - made of peanuts,
powdered milk, vegetable oil, sugar,
vitamins and minerals - is
distributed through Malawi's health-
care system and given to mothers to
feed their children at home.
"The peanut-butter feeding has been
a quantum leap in feeding
malnourished children in Africa. The
recovery rates are a remarkable
improvement from standard therapy,"
Dr Mark Manary, a pediatrics
professor at Washington University
in St Louis, said.
The Peanut Butter Project now
produces more than 270 tons of the
food in Malawi each year.
International organizations are
advocating similar programs. Several
researchers have suggested that
providing specially fortified foods
for home use is one step that can
help save the lives of hundreds of
thousands of children.
At 12 rural health centers,
village health aides identified
malnourished children based on World
Health Organization guidelines. They
followed up with the children every
other week for up to eight weeks.
Mothers are given a two-week
supply of the food and told how much
to feed their children. Children can
eat other food while receiving the
peanut-butter mixture for up to two
months.
Manary said the peanut-butter
mixture keeps well, is convenient
and has a high energy density.
Traditionally, children who are
severely malnourished are fed a
milk- based porridge in hospitals,
but they would have to eat roughly
25 spoonfuls of porridge to equal
the calorie density in one spoonful
of the peanut butter mixture,
researchers said.
The World Health Organization
estimates that nearly 20 million
children under the age of five
suffer from severe acute
malnutrition. Most live in southern
Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
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