Awareness needed to ensure nutrition level

City Desk  :

Nutritionists have said that there has been significant progress in terms of food security and hunger reduction in the country. However, the nutrition level has not been achieved in comparison to that.
They highlighted the necessity of bringing variation in food, keeping it unadulterated and raising awareness about nutrition to ensure the nutrition level, especially for the poor community.
The experts said this during a roundtable titled ‘Role of Nutrition Smart CommUNITY in improving nutrition security for rural poor community’, held at Prothom Alo office in the city’s Karwan bazar area on Thursday.
Germany-based development organisation Welthungerhilfe organised the roundtable.
During the discussion, professor Shah Golam Nabi, director of the government’s Institute of Public Health Nutrition said, “Usually the issue of food security gets priority in our food-related discussions. Only the issues like ‘if it filled the belly and provided satisfaction or not’ are discussed.”
“It is not considered how nutritious the food is. Rice is the staple food in our country and it fulfils our requirement of carbohydrates. Though it satisfies the hunger it doesn’t fill the required level of nutrition,” he added, reports Prothom Alo English.
Awareness of food is a must to ensure the nutrition level. As many as 17 different ministries of the government work separately about nutrition. For achieving exceptional success in food security coordinated initiative is required from all. However, no matter which programme is taken up it has to be sustainable, he insisted.
Nazma Shaheen, professor of nutrition and food sciences at Dhaka University said, “The government’s main target in the millennium development goals (MDG) programme was to eradicate hunger. In that aspect, it was possible to drop the number of hungry people below 2 per cent within 2017-18.”
“This is a significant achievement. However, we are lagging behind when it comes to nutrition. We are lacking in terms of variation in food. In order to achieve the goal of ensuring health for all, the nutrition level of food has to be guaranteed,” she added.
Director of the family nutrition garden project under the department of agricultural extension Akram Hossain Chowdhury said that the lack of nutrition cannot usually be seen through the naked eye. In many cases, children are growing up with nutrition deficiency.
If the mothers suffer from this problem during pregnancy, that would affect their children also. The people need to be made aware of nutrition.
The government has many initiatives working towards this end. The nutrition garden project is one of them. This project is working down to the union level, he added.