The Hidden Traps

Reflection/What I learned: This section begins with "the puzzle of nutrition". This speaks of a true phenomenon where the poor, who obviously have less money, are beginning to spend less of it on food. The reasoning behind the decline in calorie intake among the poor is that their need for calorie intake has gone down because they are ill. They have fewer children, they're doing less physical work, so they just eat less because of a declining need for their physical strength. It is then decided on that there are hidden traps all over, because of undernourishment, not getting enough of the vital nutrients for the body, etc. A discussion is then taken up about WHY don't people just buy higher calorie foods? The answers that are contemplated are: they eat what they're familiar with and don't change their diet frequently, food is unavailable or offered at higher prices, carb heavy food is cheaper and more filling, and they're uninformed of all the benefits that a healthy diet would provide them with. Children then become the discussion topic. Children are extremely important because they are still developing, and growing, and a humongous factor in determining their health status for right now and for years to come is their nutrition. A poorer person who is going to have to invest less into the nutrition of their child is going to have a much smaller lifetime earning from that child. "Deworming" is something that effects one fourth of the worlds population of children. In an experiment done in Kenya, when a group of children were dewormed at a young age (resulting in them being much more nutritionally stable/healthy) their lives became increasingly better and they earned more money over their lifetime. The role of nutrition in the womb is then discussed and how it is almost as important as nutrition in the childhood.

How it applies: This can be applied to the World Food Prize paper that I wrote about Sudan in almost the same way the previous ones can. These "hidden traps" due to poor, undernourished children have to have existed in Sudan in the areas that I conducted my research on and wrote about. Once again, evidence that I found surrounding their diets, how often they eat, etc. all suggests that they were stuck in these hidden poverty traps. The nutrition that they are forced to have because they don't have any other options would absolutely lead to undernourishment and a lack of being provided with vital nutrients that assist them in growing into strong, intellectually stable and advancing individuals.