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Columns::April 7, 2003
Telling tales: Peabodys announced for 62nd year
Three faculty receive university’s Creative Research Awards
Richard Russell Foundation funds new professorship in agriculture
State’s business schools sweep GM competition
Five undergraduates receive mid-term Foundation Fellowships
Choosing a career was ‘elementary’ decision for education professor
Administrative Changes
Kudos
Enhancing Quality Teaching
Training Day
Campus News
Formula for success
UGA food scientists help develop high-protein food that’s saving infants from malnutrition in Ghana
By Sharon Omahen
somahen@gaes.griffin.peachnet.edu
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| A mother is all smiles in Ghana as her baby is much healthier having been on a diet including the new weaning formula. The child is holding a sack of the weaning formula. |
UGA food scientists and their colleagues in the West African nation of Ghana have developed an infant food that’s saving the lives of malnourished children in the tropics of Africa.
“A significant subpopulation of children in the region often suffers from extreme protein malnutrition,” says Robert Phillips, a food scientist with the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
Unlike adults in these regions, growing children can’t survive solely on cereal-based foods.
“A child’s essential amino-acid requirement on a body-weight basis is nearly 10 times that of an adult,” Phillips says. “They just can’t survive on starchy weaning foods. They have to have additional protein, too. These children often develop edema, which causes their stomachs to swell, making them appear fat when, in fact, they’re very malnourished.”
These children also often suffer hair loss and loss of hair pigmentation, he says.
“You can spot the children who are in the extreme stages of malnutrition, because they have red hair instead of black hair,” he says. “This is just one sign of lack of protein or low protein.”
Sometimes cultural practices prevent parents in underdeveloped countries from providing their children a protein food even when it’s available, he says.
“For example, in Nigeria, some parents won’t give the children eggs because they think it will make them want to steal eggs,” Phillips says. “Of course, this is not true. But it’s an old myth, similar to many still in existence in our own society.”
To address this growing health issue, Phillips and UGA graduate student Yvonne Mensa-Wilmot, a native of Ghana, developed a high-protein weaning food made from crops indigenous to the region. The formula is designed for children who are six months to nine months old.
“Our weaning formula is a combination of cowpeas, peanuts and corn, which are all staple crops in the area,” Phillips says. “This is the key. The products have to be readily available. And the mothers have to be able to prepare the food.”
Phillips says an alternative would be for small-scale entrepreneurs to formulate and process the food into a form that requires only mixing with hot water. Since that form isn’t available, the products must first be ground. Then they’re combined, mixed with water and boiled to form porridge.
The research project was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bean/Cowpea Collaborative Research Support Program. As part of the project, UGA researchers traveled to Africa to survey mothers’ responses to the new food and their willingness to accept and use it.
“Almost every village has a mill, so the mothers have the ability to grind the products,” Phillips says. “They just have to be taught how to prepare the porridge.”
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Robert Phillips
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UGA scientists worked with Sam Sefa-Dedehand and Esther Sakyi-Dawson on the weaning formula project. Both are with the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Ghana-Legon.
“They have developed their own versions of the weaning formula,” Phillips says. “They conducted the outreach efforts to introduce all of these foods to villagers.”
A few years after introducing the new foods to several villages in Ghana, the results are dramatic. In one case, Phillips visited a child who was two years old and so malnourished he was unable to walk. Just a few months after adding the new porridge to his diet, he was much stronger and able to walk again.
“It’s truly remarkable to see,” Phillips says. “The hospitals were full of little starving, red-haired children. And now the hospital cribs are empty, because the children are no longer starving.”
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