This week is World Breastfeeding Week, honouring one of the most effective and cost-effective nutrition interventions around: human breastmilk contains all the nutrients needed for young infants, conveying health benefits for both babies and mothers.
In many parts of the world, children and adolescents do not receive the diets they need – in quantity, frequency, and quality – to survive, grow, and develop to their full potential.
Last week GAIN awarded the outgoing Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Dr Graziano Da Silva, the 2019 Nutrition Inspiration Award. When looking back at Dr Da Silva’s tenure at FAO it is surprising at how revolutionary it has been. Unlike some others in our field, Dr Graziano has grasped that the world of hunger and nutrition is rapidly changing and he has equipped FAO to address those challenges.
FACT provides standardised methods for the collection, analysis, and synthesis of data on quality, coverage, and consumption of fortified foods across countries while allowing for adaptations to meet specific country needs and contexts. Specifically, it provides step-by-step guidance on how to decide, design, and conduct a FACT survey.
Last week, GAIN co-led a five-day Executive Short Course entitled "Together for Nutrition: Public-Private engagement to improve the consumption of nutritious food". The course, the first of its kind, was made available by the six funders who together support GAIN’s Making Markets Work for Nutritious Foods programme.
What makes a great footballer? Presumably, training, determination… and muscle. Building muscle requires consuming large amounts of protein and energy, and eating meat is a highly efficient way of doing this. For the rest of us who are not athletes, however, it is less challenging to consume enough protein and energy in a standard portion size of food, and hundreds of millions of adults live a happy and healthy life without consuming any meat.
Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director of GAIN, gave an introductory speech at the Conference on Building Business Contributions for the 2020 Global Nutrition Summit in Japan.
Recently GAIN and the Accesss to Nutrition Foundation (ATNF) co-hosted a meeting on "Building Business Commitments for the 2020 Nutrition for Growth Summit" in The Hague. There were 140 participants, with over 60 representatives from the business community. The host was the Government of the Netherlands and the meeting was opened by the Government of Japan, which will host next year’s Global Nutrition Summit.
GAIN and the Consumer Goods Forum co-convened a meeting on Better Nutrition for a Healthier Workforce. The purpose was to review the evidence and, if warranted, to elevate the issue beyond the rather low-key profile it currently has. What is a workforce nutrition programme? We reviewed evidence from high- and low-income countries and from corporate headquarters to supply chain settings.
The retail sector is where consumers come face to face with food. Retailers have significant influence over whether the food that consumers face is nutritious, safe, available, affordable or attractive. I have heard it said many times that the chief buyers for large food retailers are more important in influencing food choices than Ministries of Agriculture or Food.
