Animal sourced foods and child stunting

Derek Headey, Kalle Hirvonen and John Hoddinott

No 1695, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Stunting affects 160 million pre-school children around the world, and imposes significant costs on a child’s health, cognitive development, schooling and economic performance. Stunting in early childhood has been linked to poor dietary diversity, notably low intake of animal-sourced foods (ASFs) rich in high quality protein and other growth-stimulating nutrients. Surprisingly, however, very little economic research has focused on ASFs and child growth. In this paper we redress this omission through an analysis of 112,553 children aged 6-23 months from 46 countries. We first document distinctive patterns of ASF consumption among children in different regions, particularly highly variable patterns of dairy consumption, low consumption of eggs and meat, and surprisingly frequent consumption of fish in several poor regions of Africa and Asia. We then examine how ASF consumption is associated with child stunting in multivariate models saturated with control variables.

Keywords: animal products; nutrition; child nutrition; malnutrition; nutritional disorders; livestock; fisheries; agricultural policies; food policies; food consumption; developing countries; protein intake, (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cdm15738.contentdm.oclc.org/utils/getfile/c ... /filename/132446.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Animal Sourced Foods and Child Stunting (2018)
Working Paper: Animal sourced foods and child stunting (2018)
Working Paper: Animal sourced foods and child stunting (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1695

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().