While the entire dietary pattern of children is important to cognitive function and school performance, breakfast is identified as a leverage point that schools can use to increase achievement. Nutrient deficiencies are linked to physical, mental, and behavioral health problems, as well as learning deficiencies, lower arithmetic grades, and repeating a grade. The quality of a child’s breakfast is especially important to brain function because of the timing of the meal.

The report also stresses the synergistic effects of the different health disparities. This means that breakfast and the related nutritional deficiencies also contribute to other key health disparities such as vision, inattention, and hyperactivity. In order to improve education and achievement on a broad scale, assuring nutrient-rich, daily breakfasts is key.

Read the entire report here.

The study also extolls the benefits of Farm to School programs that connect local small and mid-sized farms to school lunch programs. Of the eleven Farm to School programs that were studied, ten produced positive dietary behavior changes. Examples of these changes included increased use of the salad bar and increased participation in the school nutrition program.

Read the full article here.

The full report is available here.

Such tests—especially if they are inexpensive and capable of being used by producers and consumers—would create the outcome-based measurements to enable effective consumer demand for full nourishment foods and supplements that work. It would likely stimulate development of new products, new service delivery techniques, and efficient commercial transactions along standardized measures.  Even in early versions, such tests would help in field trials of advanced multi-nutrient supplement products in targeted populations. [link to field trials]  Such trials, appropriately documented, will develop evidence of the impact of full nourishment, as well as test a variety of delivery models for reaching underserved low-income populations.

In addition, standards by which to collect and manage large amounts of data on nutritional and wellness outcomes are essential for rapidly seeing what works—in healthy land management strategies, in nutrient-rich farming practices, in wellness strategies for people. This means innovation to develop new, cheap, and widely available devices, as well as consensus on the metrics to used, are important.

Fortunately, underlying trends in information and telecommunication systems can facilitate building an information infrastructure to undergird the nutrient economy. Data-mining of large data sets is becoming inexpensive and offers new ways of detecting and documenting important connections. And mobile devices are increasingly sophisticated, so that they can empower front-line health workers (and soon, patients themselves) and front-line producers such as farmers with guidance, data, and even immediate diagnostics from mobile sensors that measure soil conditions or a woman’s anemia. When a mobile device can also measure wide-spectrum nutrient content in food or in a person, and simultaneously share or record that data, it will be a different world—and that time might not be far away.

An important consideration is to make available to citizens all information generated by the nutritional measurement systems about themselves and systemic information which is relevant to them.  A personal electronic wellness record including health and nutritional status and interventions is an example of the first, as is access to relevant information about wellness issues.  Public access to results from clinics, hospitals, food processing and inspections, practitioner ratings and the like are examples of the second.  These allow the public to hold government and the private sector accountable.  And in the nutrient economy context, the same assessment applies to wellness of land and farms as it does to individual human beings.

We invite partners to help develop the tools, the metrics, and the data systems needed to support the Nutrient Economy.

It is becoming evident that the right nutrients in the right form can have a real impact on health and wellness.

Read the full article here.

Text messaging interventions increased adherence to ART and smoking cessation and should be considered for inclusion in services. Although there is suggestive evidence of benefit in some other areas, high quality adequately powered trials of optimised interventions are required to evaluate effects on objective outcomes.

 To read the full article, click here.

“…the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, organized a conference entitled “Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development: Building a Consensus,” which was hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Partners included key multilateral, US agencies and public and private organizations. The assembly endorsed the utility of this initiative and the need for the BOND (Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development) project to continue. A consensus was reached on the requirement to develop a process to inform the community about the relative strengths or weaknesses and specific applications of various biomarkers under defined conditions. The articles in this supplement summarize the deliberations of the 4 working groups: research, clinical, policy, and programmatic. Also described are content presentations on the harmonization processes, the evidence base for biomarkers for 5 case-study micronutrients, and new frontiers in science and technology.”

To read the full article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, click here.