UC Davis team combats malnutrition
Published: Tuesday, Mar. 9, 2010 - 7:09 am
It's a sweet, oily, peanut butter-ish substance capturing the Willy Wonka-ism that mixing sugar and fat is a recipe for success.
Only the UC Davis researchers who created Nutributter have a lofty goal: preventing childhood malnutrition across the world.
Each ketchup-packet-size dose of Nutributter is 4 teaspoons stuffed with 120 calories and all 40 essential vitamins and minerals.
The goal is to get children in developing nations to consume one packet a day, starting in infancy.
"Kids love it," said Steve Vosti, part of the UC Davis team that helped develop Nutributter. "And if we are successful in introducing it, we will have a relatively cheap way of keeping kids on their mental and physical growth paths."
The UC Davis team leads the International Lipid-based Nutrient Supplements (iLiNS) Project, an international collaboration that is currently testing Nutributter in three African countries. Last year, the project won a $16 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant.
The idea of ready-to-eat food packets originates from Plumpy'nut, a similar paste of oil, milk powder and sugar used to combat severe childhood malnutrition. Each packet has 500 calories, and children can gain 1 to 2 pounds a week by eating it twice daily. In 2004, Plumpy'nut was credited with saving some 30,000 lives in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Nutributter is different because it's not an emergency measure, the researchers said.
Plumpy'nut was designed as a sole food source for severely malnourished children, whereas Nutributter complements - rather than replaces - home-prepared food, said UC Davis nutrition professor Kathryn Dewey. Parents can mix the paste into the foods they feed their children, usually some kind of porridge. Ideally, it will prevent childhood malnutrition and ensure proper cognitive and physical development.
"Many households simply don't have access to highly nutritious foods," Dewey said. "Because infants don't need a lot of calories, we've designed a supplement that is low in calories but has all the essential nutrients."
The iLiNS team is conducting field trials in three African nations: Malawi, Ghana and Burkina Faso. They will enroll about 7,000 infants and pregnant and lactating women, who receive free Nutributter packets in exchange for participating in weekly checkups and surveys.
A 2004-06 Nutributter trial in Ghana reduced childhood anemia and growth stunting and doubled the number of children who could walk independently at age 1.
But Nutributter's positive health effects are just one component of making it a successful venture. The 10-cent packets should be self-sustaining, so that if they were sold in grocery stores, parents would choose to buy them, said Vosti, an economics professor.
"There are plenty of examples of things we know would work, but people simply aren't adopting them," he said. "We need to have a game plan for what can be done to make sure these supplements get into the mouths of youngsters who need them."
One way of doing this is to satiate palates around the world. The team says kids like and ask for the sweet paste, but creating versions using local flavors might make Nutributter more appealing. For example, they are working on a cinnamon-flavored version to be evaluated in Guatemala, and cumin and cardamom versions for Bangladesh, Dewey said.
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