The devastation of malnutrition is hard to overstate, but so is the countervailing power of nutrition. The most obvious proof of the power of good nutrition can be seen in the taller, stronger, healthier children of many countries, separated by only a generation from their shorter, less robust parents, and by the better diets and more healthful, nurturing environments they enjoy.
Stronger children grow into stronger, more productive adults.
Well-nourished girls grow into women who face fewer risks during pregnancy and childbearing, and whose children set out on firmer developmental paths, physically and mentally. Approximately half of the economic growth achieved by the United Kingdom and a number of Western European countries between 1790 and 1980, for example, has been attributed to better nutrition and improved health and sanitation conditions, social investments made as much as a century earlier. In parts of Brazil, for example, the percentage of underweight children plummeted from 17 per cent in 1973 to just under 6 per cent in 1996, at a time when poverty rates almost doubled. Much has already been achieved. And more than 60 per cent of young children around the world are receiving vitamin A supplements.