A new plant-based therapeutic food made from crops grown in Kenya offers a promising alternative to imported treatments for childhood malnutrition.<\/p>\n
Food can help a severely malnourished child put weight back on, but getting the right food to that child is another problem.<\/p>\n
Much of the treatment used today is a paste made with peanuts and milk powder, and the milk often has to be imported.<\/p>\n
That dependence on imports is one reason researchers have been trying to make a suitable paste from\u00a0crops<\/a>\u00a0grown locally. <\/p>\n A recipe put together in Kenya uses\u00a0soybeans<\/a>, maize, sorghum, and a small amount of chickpea protein.<\/p>\n In a six-week study, a plant-based paste helped malnourished young rats gain more weight than a commercial treatment containing peanuts and milk.<\/p>\n The rats took to the\u00a0plant<\/a>\u00a0mixture after a few days and ate more of it.<\/p>\n The results tell us how these two foods performed in rats. They don\u2019t yet tell us which food would help children most, and neither of the tested recipes met every nutrition guideline.<\/p>\n Getting treatment to more children<\/p>\n For every 10 children with severe acute malnutrition, only about three receive the treatment. <\/p>\n This is a food called ready-to-use therapeutic food, used for severe cases without medical complications.<\/p>\n UN estimates<\/a>\u00a0put the number of children under five with acute malnutrition at about 45 million. A third have the severe form, which contributes to nearly 1 million deaths each year.<\/p>\n The recipe no longer has to contain\u00a0dairy<\/a>\u00a0under\u00a0international guidelines<\/a>\u00a0issued in 2022. It does, however, have to meet the nutrition requirements, whatever its ingredients.<\/p>\n A recipe made in Kenya<\/p>\n The study\u2019s lead researcher, Aur\u00e9lie Bechoff, is affiliated with the University of Greenwich\u2019s\u00a0Natural Resources Institute<\/a> in England. <\/p>\n She carried out the work as a visiting researcher at the\u00a0Hebrew University of Jerusalem<\/a>.<\/p>\n The recipe builds on an earlier soybean, maize and sorghum paste tested in children. <\/p>\n Children recovered on that food, although they gained weight a little more slowly than those given the standard paste, a gap the researchers attributed to\u00a0protein<\/a>\u00a0quality.<\/p>\n This time, the team added concentrated\u00a0chickpea<\/a>\u00a0protein, accounting for 2% of the paste\u2019s weight. A 44-pound (20-kilogram) batch was made in Murang\u2019a, Kenya, checked for mold toxins and germs, then sent to Israel.<\/p>\n There, the researchers set up a six-week experiment with 48 newly weaned female rats.<\/p>\n First came a poor diet<\/p>\n For three weeks, half the rats ate a balanced diet with 20.5% protein. The other half received just 5% protein and half the usual vitamins and minerals.<\/p>\n The difference soon showed in their size: poorly fed rats weighed less than half as much as the healthy ones.<\/p>\n For the remaining three weeks, some rats from each group switched to the plant paste and others to the commercial paste. The rest carried on eating their original food.<\/p>\n Within four days of the change, malnourished rats on the plant paste weighed more than those left on the poor diet. About a week later, they were longer, too.<\/p>\n Growth improved but stayed behind<\/p>\n By the end, malnourished rats eating the plant paste weighed about 5.2 ounces (147 grams). <\/p>\n That was roughly 50% more than rats still on the poor diet, but well below the 7.8 ounces (220 grams) reached by healthy rats eating balanced food.<\/p>\n From nose to tail, rats on the plant paste reached about 13.4 inches (34 centimeters); those on the poor diet reached 12.6 inches (32 centimeters).<\/p>\n Rats given the commercial paste finished at about the same weight and length as rats that never left the poor diet. Both pastes did, however, help thigh bones grow longer, with little difference between them.<\/p>\n In rats that started healthy, the plant paste made no difference to growth. The commercial paste slowed weight gain.<\/p>\n Some rats ate much more<\/p>\n At first, the rats ate less of their unfamiliar food. Those on the plant paste then increased their intake, while rats eating the commercial paste continued to eat less.<\/p>\n Over three weeks, the formerly malnourished rats consumed about 1,100 calories each on the plant paste, 800 on the commercial paste and 680 on the poor diet. <\/p>\n These were averages from cages of four rats, not measurements of what each animal ate.<\/p>\n The team suspects the\u00a0grains<\/a>\u00a0and beans tasted more familiar because similar ingredients go into the rats\u2019 usual food. Whether children would share that preference is another matter.<\/p>\n There was also a difference in what the rats got out of their food. For each calorie and each gram of protein eaten, rats on the plant paste gained more weight than those on the commercial paste.<\/p>\n The foods differed in protein<\/p>\n Protein supplied about 14% of the calories in the plant paste and 10% in the commercial paste. Its quality differed, too.<\/p>\n To judge quality, researchers score how well a food provides the protein building blocks needed for growth and how much of that protein is digested. <\/p>\n The plant paste received a protein quality score of 87%, compared with 69% for the commercial paste. Both fell below the guideline target of 90%.<\/p>\n The commercial sample fell short mainly on lysine, which the body cannot make for itself. The researchers had only tested one sample of the commercial paste, so they don\u2019t know whether another batch would have scored differently.<\/p>\n The plant paste had its own problems, with slightly too much protein and a fiber content of 6.9%, when the guidelines allow up to 5%. <\/p>\n Testing a milk-based paste that meets the protein quality target would help show whether the difference came from protein quality or its source.<\/p>\n Local production is the hope<\/p>\n Co-author Efrat Monsonego-Ornan is a professor in the Hebrew University\u2019s\u00a0Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAccess is one of the biggest challenges in treating childhood malnutrition,\u201d Monsonego-Ornan said. <\/p>\n \u201cIf therapeutic foods can be produced from high-quality ingredients that are already grown locally, we may be able to reduce dependence on costly imports and make treatment available to many more children.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe nutritional quality has to remain the priority, but affordability and local production are essential if we want effective solutions to reach the populations that need them most.\u201d<\/p>\n The rats also recovered some lost length, raising the possibility that the food could help address both acute malnutrition and stunted growth.<\/p>\n Children face more complicated causes of malnutrition, though, so trials in children must come before any claim that this blend works for them.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Current Developments in Nutrition<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new plant-based therapeutic food made from crops grown in Kenya offers a promising alternative to imported treatments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":628706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[134,111,139,556,69],"class_list":["post-628705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nutrition","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}