Who is Ignorant? Rural Mothers Who Feed Their Well-Nourished Children or the Nutrition Experts? The Tanzania Story

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Periodical article

Title:	Who is Ignorant? Rural Mothers Who Feed Their Well-Nourished Children or the Nutrition Experts? The Tanzania Story
Author:	Kimati, Valerian P.
Year:	1986
Periodical:	Journal of Tropical Pediatrics
Volume:	32
Issue:	3
Period:	June
Pages:	130-136
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Tanzania
Subjects:	children food Family Life Health, Nutrition, and Medicine Women and Their Children
External link:	http://tropej.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/32/3/130
Abstract:	Protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) is the most wide-spread and threatening of all forms of malnutrition in Tanzania. It is the underlying cause of about 50 percent of all deaths of children under the age of five. Poverty, disease and ignorance are some of the major causes of PEM. Adequate food intake is facilitated by tackling all three simultaneously. On the question of ignorance: it should not automatically be assumed that rural mothers are always 'ignorant' in managing to feed their children. Some 70 percent of under-fives in Tanzania are well-nourished thanks to prolonged breast-feeding and certain traditional customs, including the fact that traditional weaning foods and weaning practices have good nutritional base. This is why some nutrition workers have begun to 'rethink' nutrition education in order to correct past mistakes and rid nutrition intervention programmes of their Western bias. App., ref.