Nutrition is a top priority for early childhood development. Good nutrition in an infant’s first 1,000 days ensures healthy brain and body growth. This has long-lasting consequences for a child’s academic and professional potential. The IAEA provides its Member States with the information and tools to fight malnutrition using isotopic techniques.With World Breastfeeding Week 2015 taking place this week, it’s the right moment to explore the important role that breast milk plays in preventing malnutrition. (Photo credit: Eugenia Aguilar Lema) Recently, new research has underscored the developmental benefits associated with breast milk. It lowers the incidence of asthma and allergies, and contains helpful antibodies. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of a child’s life, and many governments carry out programmes to support exclusive breastfeeding. However, self-reporting by mothers on practicing exclusive breastfeeding is not always accurate. (Photo credit: Christine Slater)
Using a stable, non-radioactive isotope of deuterium, nutritional experts can gauge whether or not a child is being exclusively breastfed, as the WHO and other health authorities recommend. The mother drinks a single oral dose of deuterated water, which then appears in the baby’s saliva samples within two weeks. This allows nutritionists to quantify the child’s human milk intake, and to determine if other fluids were consumed. If other liquids have been taken, then breastfeeding has not been exclusive. (Photo credit: Urmila Deshmukh)The IAEA can support the evaluation of national breastfeeding programmes by helping countries to ensure the accuracy of exclusive breastfeeding information provided by parents. Through its technical cooperation programme, the IAEA builds capacities in national staff to use nuclear techniques to measure the transfer of human milk from mother to child. (Photo credit: Helen Mulol)IAEA staff and national partners attend and support international conferences related to nutrition and breastfeeding to raise awareness of the contribution of nuclear techniques to improving neo-natal care. At the 2015 Federation of African Nutrition Societies (FANUS) Conference, IAEA-supported experts presented their experiences of how stable isotopes can be used to measure human milk intake, body composition and energy expenditure. Data like these are essential when designing nutritional interventions. We had the opportunity to speak with the attending experts. (Photo credit: Cornelia Loechl)
Grace Munthali is a nutritionist working at the National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research, Zambia. (Photo credit: Cornelia Loechl) Helen Mulol is an analytical chemist with the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, South Africa. (Photo credit: Cornelia Loechl) Khalid El Kari is a nutrition researcher at the Centre National de l’Energie des Sciences et des Techniques Nucleaires, Morocco. (Photo credit: Cornelia Loechl)Nadine Coulibaly is a nutritionist working at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Sante, Burkina Faso. (Photo credit: Cornelia Loechl)
