The U.S. government's global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, has prevented 2.2 million children from experiencing malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, according to new research led by Stanford Health Policy's PhD candidate Tess Ryckman.

The researchers compared children’s health in 33 low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In 12 of those countries, Feed the Future provided services such as agricultural assistance and financial services for farmers, as well as direct nutrition support, such as nutrient supplementation. 

The study, published online Dec. 11 in The BMJ, found a 3.9 percentage point decrease in chronic malnutrition among children served by Feed the Future, leading to 2.2 million fewer children whose development has been harmed by malnourishment.

“What we see with stunting rates is striking,” Ryckman said. “I would argue that 2 million fewer children stunted over seven years is major progress and puts a substantial dent in total stunting levels. And that’s 2 million children who will now have the levels of physical and cognitive development to allow them to reach their full potential.”

Stunting, or having a low height for a particular age, is a key indicator of child malnutrition. Children who aren’t properly nourished in their first 1,000 days are more likely to get sick more often, to perform poorly in school, grow up to be economically disadvantaged and suffer from chronic diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

A Controlled Study

Feed the Future is thought to be the world’s largest agricultural and nutrition program, with around $6 billion in funding from USAID (plus more from other federal agencies) between 2010 and 2015. Despite its size, much remains unknown about the effectiveness of the program.

The researchers analyzed survey data on almost 900,000 children younger than 5 in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2017. They compared children from the Feed the Future countries with those in countries that are not participants in the program, both before and after the program’s implementation in 2011.

The researchers found the results were even more pronounced — a 4.6 percentage point decline in stunting — when they restricted their sample to populations most likely to have been reached by program. These included children who were younger when the program began, rural areas where Feed the Future operated more intensively, and in countries where the program had greater geographic coverage.

“Our findings are certainly encouraging because it has been difficult for other programs and interventions to demonstrate impact on stunting, and this program has received a lot of funding, so it’s good to see that it’s having an impact,” Ryckman said.

Multifaceted Approach to Nutrition

Experts are divided about the best way to help the world’s 149 million malnourished children: Is assistance that directly targets nutrition, such as breastfeeding promotion or nutrient supplementation, more effective? Or is it also beneficial to tackle the problem at its root by supporting agriculture and confronting household poverty?

The authors, including Stanford Health Policy’s Eran Bendavid, MD, associate professor of medicine, and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies and a senior fellow senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said their analysis supports the value of a multifaceted approach to combating malnutrition among children, namely leveraging agriculture and food security interventions.

“Independent evaluations of large health policy programs such as Feed the Future help build the evidence base needed to tackle persistent patterns of undernutrition,” said Bendavid, an epidemiologist. “The widespread prevalence of stunting and chronic undernutrition is among the most common and yet most stubborn cause of underdevelopment in the world, and learning what works in this space is sorely needed.”

The researchers, including Stanford medical students Margot Robinson and Courtney Pederson, speculated that possible drivers of the program’s effectiveness include three features of Feed the Future’s design: its country-tailored approach; its focus on underlying drivers of nutrition, such as empowering female farmers; and its large scale and adequate funding.

The authors hope their independent evaluation of the program might lead to more funding and support for it. At the very least, they said, it should demonstrate to people working on Feed the Future and the broader global nutrition program community that programs focused mostly on agriculture and food security — indirect contributors to malnutrition — can lead to success.

Value Unknown

Feed the Future has been scaled back in recent years — it once served 19 countries and now reaches only 12. The program’s budget also remains somewhat murky.

“While there isn’t much data on the program’s funding under the Trump administration, the program appears to have been scaled back, at least in terms of the countries where it operates,” Ryckman said. “It’s possible that some of these gains could be lost, absent longer-term intervention from Feed the Future.”

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The researchers also did not look at whether the program provided high value for the money spent.

“While we find that it has been effective, it hasn’t led to drastic declines in stunting and it is unclear whether it is good value for money,” she said.

Ryckman also noted that USAID’s own evaluation of its program is tenuous because it looked only at before-and-after stunting levels in Feed the Future countries without comparing the results to a control group or adjusting for other sources of bias, which is problematic because stunting is slowly declining in most countries.

“These types of evaluations are misleading,” Ryckman said. “The U.S. government really needs to prioritize having their programs independently evaluated using more robust methods. That was part of our motivation for doing this study.”

Support for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health (grant P20-AG17253), the National Science Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

“Vic-TOR-ia!” Fátima cried, a grin lighting up her face. The 5-year-old had become fast friends with Stanford medical student Tori Bawel almost instantly after Bawel arrived in San Lucas Tolimán. After giving piggy-back rides to Fátima, a career in global pediatrics changed from a distant wish to a developing reality for Bawel.

Bawel is one of a few lucky medical students to travel with Stanford pediatrician Paul Wise, MD, MPH, to San Lucas Tolimán, a town in the mountains of rural Guatemala that serves as a base for his work to improve nutrition for local children. Once she completes her medical training, Bawel plans to devote her life to improving health in underserved areas.

“As an elementary school student, I was really compelled by issues of social justice,” she said. “I hope that over the course of my lifetime, I’m able to make a difference like physicians have done here in Guatemala and around the world.”

Every summer, Wise, a professor of pediatrics and a Stanford Health Policy core faculty member, takes a handful of undergraduates to the communities around San Lucas to learn about the Rural Guatemala Child Health and Nutrition Program. A collaboration between Stanford and a group of local health promoters, the program uses nutritional supplements and health education to save the lives of children under five. The students follow the promoters on house visits, help them measure the weight and height of children and gain an understanding of how the program helps the rural communities.

“We feel it is part of our educational mission,” said Wise. “We want to grow people who will make a difference, and part of that is providing them opportunities to do so.”

Bawel’s experience reinforced her desire to engage in global health work: “It’s inspired me and motivated me to want to give my life, like Wise, to… serving in areas of the world with the greatest need.”

Meeting Guatemalan students who overcame economic difficulties to study medicine — like Flor Julajuj — was also deeply moving for Bawel. Very few in rural Guatemala have the opportunity to pursue higher education or good health care. But with some help from Wise, Julajuj was able to attend medical school; just this month, she graduated from the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City.

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“It’s been a great opportunity,” said Julajuj. “It’s changed my life.”

Most, though, are not so lucky; Bawel also encountered two young women who dream of becoming physicians but cannot afford medical school. Meeting the young, ambitious women “makes me want to empower them with the education and opportunities I have had,” said Bawel.

Wise, meanwhile, will continue to each Stanford students about ways to help these communities.

“They see the poverty, but they also begin to understand why being a great doctor or a great diplomat or a great economist will serve the interests of people down here if done well,” he said. “We want them to go back to whatever field they’re interested in, committed to gaining skills and then using them to serve the needs and the rights of people in places like San Lucas.”

The boy’s genetic disorder would have been terminal anywhere, but thanks to Wise and local health promoters, the boy’s family had years with him instead of months.

They found the doctor through the Guatemala Rural Child Health and Nutrition Program, a collaboration between Wise and the health promoters to eliminate death by malnutrition for children under 5.

While Wise spoke to the heartbroken mother, his Stanford research assistant Alejandro Chavez helped the promoters set up inside a local community center to measure the weight and height of local kids to determine their nutrition level.

Chavez and the promoters had worked together for months to create an app for tablets that will make it easier to find malnourished children.

The app they designed will decrease training time for new health promoters and allow the program to expand. The goal is to distribute the app globally to help programs in other countries tackle malnutrition.

Children in crisis

As recently as 2005, about one of every 20 children in this rural area of Guatemala died before their 5th birthday. Almost half the deaths were associated with severe malnutrition.

“The death of any child is always a tragedy, but the death of any child from preventable causes is always unjust,” said Wise, a Stanford Health Policy core faculty member.

Along with other faculty from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the School of Medicine, Wise created the Children in Crisis Initiative to save the lives of children in areas of poor governance. The program brings together Stanford researchers and students across disciplines.

Nowhere are their efforts better illustrated than in the rural communities around San Lucas Tolimán, in the central mountains of Guatemala.

The program’s effectiveness rests on a deep respect for the local communities merged with innovation by Stanford researchers.

“It’s absolutely essential to any program that the people in need be part of the solution,” said Wise. Unlike many nongovernmental organizations and health programs, Wise believes the way to create a sustainable health system is for the locals to run it, so the health promoters manage the program’s day-to-day activities.

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This leaves the Stanford team free to focus on innovation – such as the new app. They believe the technology could change child health programs around the world. Wise’s team has partnered with Medic Mobile – a nonprofit that creates open-source software for health care workers – which plans to distribute the app to other areas suffering from malnutrition.

The six Android tablets purchased by Children in Crisis are enough to monitor the program’s 1,500 kids through the app.

Role of nutrition

When done well, nutrition surveillance is very effective at decreasing child mortality in poor countries.

“Nutrition contributes enormously to health and well-being,” Wise said as he walked through Tierra Santa, a small community near San Lucas, making house calls. “So the focus of our work turned to improving young child nutrition. It’s not an easy thing to do in a place that’s extremely poor.”

Wise and his colleagues – Stanford medical student Tori Bawel and Stanford professor of pediatrics Lisa Chamberlain – made their rounds during their visit in March. Evidence of poverty was everywhere.

Here, clean tap water is a dream and even the sturdier homes often lack four walls or paned windows, though the children were neatly dressed in T-shirts or colorful traje, traditional Mayan clothing.

It’s hard to provide proper nutrition when most families can’t find enough work to buy adequate food. But a little help can make a big difference.

Bawel, a first-year medical student who plans a career improving health in areas of poverty, was struck by the impact the promoter program has had on the community.

“There are children who need supplements and nutrition to stay alive,” she said. “Without this program, that infrastructure does not exist.”

With FSI’s assistance, the nutrition program distributes Incaparina, a supplement of cornmeal, soy and essential nutrients. The sweet, mealy drink helps the program’s most malnourished children get back on track.

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Every two months, the promoters gather each community’s children to measure their weight and height. Children and their mothers sit patiently, waiting for their turn. The children enjoy a cup of Incaparina, and their mothers eagerly listen to the promoters’ tips for keeping their children healthy.

“It’s very important to me,” said Elsira Rosibel Samayoa, who brought her 2-year-old to be measured. “There are mothers who don’t understand the importance of monitoring their children’s weight, but I do.”

Since its implementation in 2009, the Stanford program has slashed nutrition-based mortality in the participating communities by about 80 percent and decreased severe malnutrition by more than 60 percent – saving hundreds of children’s lives.

However, nutrition surveillance and intervention isn’t easy. Tracking nutrition takes training and expertise, and when the local population rarely exceeds a fourth-grade education, learning these skills is especially challenging. Detailed graphs on a standard growth chart are essential to identifying malnourished children.

“The community health workers are extremely capable and smart, but some have never seen a graph before,” said Wise. “Think about what it is to try to explain a graph to someone for the first time.”

It takes the health workers about three years to learn to graph and then interpret the results for intervention.

Wise said, “So we all got together and said, ‘How do we make this easier to do?’”

The app was the answer.

‘Let’s create an app’

Enter Alejandro Chavez, a recent Stanford computer science graduate and Stanford Health Policy research assistant. He developed the app to collect child health data, then determine the child’s degree of malnutrition and suggest intervention.

“The major goal was to lower training requirements and make programs like this simpler to start and maintain,” said Chavez, who now lives and works in Guatemala, where he gets daily feedback from the health promoters.

“I feel like they’ve been very honest with me about things I need to improve,” he said.

Cesia Lizeth Castro Chutá is a senior coordinator for the program who has worked with Chavez to ensure that the app meets the promoters’ needs.

“The tablet automatically generates the information we need to know,” she said. “It becomes easier to confirm that a child is malnourished and needs supplements.”

Looking forward

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With the app’s launch, it looks like training time for the promoters will be reduced from three years to less than six months. That means new communities can be incorporated into the program quickly, creating broader access to care.

Meanwhile, many health programs around the world are waiting to see how well the Stanford app works in Guatemala.

Josh Nesbit, a Stanford alumnus and Medic Mobile CEO, said, “As more health programs recognize the importance of nutrition and implement community-based interventions, screening and surveillance tools will be critical. We must learn from Dr. Wise’s success.”

Nearly 100 health economists from across the United States signed a pledge urging U.S. presidential candidates to make chronic disease a policy priority. Karen Eggleston, a scholar of comparative healthcare systems and director of Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, is one of the signatories. 

The pledge calls upon the candidates to reset the national healthcare agenda to better address chronic disease, which causes seven out of 10 deaths in America and affects the economy through lost productivity and disability.

Read the pledge below.

Rates of obesity in the United States remain extremely high. New statistics show that nearly two-thirds of adults are at an unhealthy weight and that – for the first time ever – obese Americans now outnumber those who are merely overweight.

Two Stanford public health law experts say one of biggest culprits of the obesity epidemic – on top of fast foods and our sedentary lifestyle – are sugary drinks.

And they believe the sweet spot for public health law in curbing the adverse effects of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) lies in the strategic use of measures such as higher SSB taxes, limits on advertisements targeting kids, and restrictions on soft drinks and sugar-sweetened teas and sports drinks in government institutions, such as public schools.

“It’s always possible to get more and better evidence about the effectiveness of public health laws,” says David Studdert, a professor of medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, professor at the Stanford Law School and core faculty member at the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research.

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“But enough is already known about the promise of some legal interventions to curb SSB consumption – significant tax hikes and advertising restrictions are two good examples – to be fairly confident that they would make a difference.”

Studdert is the lead author of a review paper published July 7 in PLoS Medicine, entitled, “Searching for Public Health Law’s Sweet Spot: The Regulation of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages.”

Studdert and senior author Michelle Mello, professor of law and professor of health research and policy at the School of Medicine, and co-author Jordan Flanders, a former Stanford Law School student, argue that sugary drinks are a substantial, yet preventable contributor to the global burden of obesity and associated health conditions.

A new study published June 29 in the American Heart Association journal Circulation linked the consumption of sugary drinks to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, with more than 25,000 of those Americans. The study, conducted by researchers from Tufts University, found that the beverages are responsible for an estimated 133,000 of those deaths from diabetes, 45,000 from cardiovascular disease and 6,450 from cancer.

While Americans’ consumption of sugary drinks has plateaued, according to the Tufts study, about three-fourths of the deaths due to SSBs are now in developing countries. Mexico leads with 24,000 total deaths. The United States still ranks fourth, however, just behind South Africa and Morocco.

The Stanford researchers say the evidence shows that sugary drinks are contributors to the global obesity epidemic, but the appropriate reach of regulation to curtail SSB consumptions remains highly contested.

The main regulatory approaches to SSBs are higher taxes, restrictions on the availability of the sugar-sweetened drinks in schools, restrictions on advertising and marketing, labeling requirements and government procurement and benefits standards.

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“Finding public health law’s sweet spot requires regulatory approaches that are capable both of achieving measurable improvements to public health and of winning victories in courts of law and public opinion,” the researchers write.

Over the last decade, many national, state, and local governments have introduced laws aimed at curbing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), especially by children. The main regulatory approaches have been taxes, restrictions on the availability of SSBs in schools, calls for controls on advertising and marketing, labeling requirements, and government procurement and benefits standards.

But efforts to regulate the drinks often encounter stiff opposition, including claims that the laws are inequitable, do not achieve their goals, and have negative economic effects.

New York City’s attempt to ban the sale of jumbo-sized sugary drinks sold in city restaurants, theaters and food carts triggered international headlines and a firestorm of opposition. The soft drink industry embarked on a multimillion-dollar campaign to block the proposal championed by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The proposal died last year when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the city’s Board of Health had “exceeded the scope of its regulatory authority.”

Taxes on SSBs, the most commonly adopted measure, vary widely, the authors write. A few countries, most notably several South Pacific island nations, where obesity rates are among the highest in the world, have introduced very high taxes on sugary drinks.

But most sugar-sweetened beverage taxes add between 5 and 9 cents per liter. This is well short of the level that experts argue is needed to significantly affect consumption and weight outcomes: a sales tax of at least 20 percent of the container’s price or a specific excise tax of 1 cent per ounce.

“In the United States, there have been many government proposals to introduce or raise taxes – most unsuccessful,” the authors write. “The beverage industry has invested heavily in public relations firms and `grassroots’ organizations to oppose the initiatives.”

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Berkeley, Calif., recently became the first U.S. city to pass an SSB tax, a penny-per-ounce excise on soda distributors, but a similar ballot measure in nearby San Francisco failed. At least 22 states have proposed SSB taxes since 2010, but only one state, Washington, passed a measure at the level recommended by economists – and it was repealed the following year in a voter referendum.

Yet U.S. childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than one-third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese.

“There is broad consensus in the public health community that reducing the influence of advertising is a critical step in addressing the spread of childhood obesity,” the authors say.

The United States and Canada have sought to regulate advertisers through a soft approach — mainly via voluntary guidelines and pressure to self-regulate, the authors write.

“These appear to have had only a modest impact on marketing practices,” they said. “U.S. regulators face considerable legal barriers in going further, including courts’ increasingly expansive interpretations of the scope of protected commercial speech under the First Amendment. Unless judicial currents shift, it will remain extremely difficult to impose restrictions on SSB advertising.”

Mello said low- and middle-income countries should anticipate that SSB companies will increasingly target them as promising markets, and that those developing countries should start crafting their regulatory responses now.

“Our experience with tobacco control teaches us that lower- and middle-income countries need to become wary when product regulation in the U.S. tightens,” Mello said. “Like squeezing a balloon, it pushes companies to intensify their marketing efforts overseas, and our public health problems get exported."

And, the authors note, while policy nudges have become fashionable, “there are dangers in treading too lightly.” “Strategies such as calorie labels, portion caps, and small beverage taxes preserve consumer freedom but are typically too modest to affect consumer behavior – and such modesty can be recast as arbitrariness. Industry opposition will come whether the intervention is modest or aggressive but should be easier to combat if officials can show their policy is effective,” they wrote.

“One somewhat surprising message that comes from reviewing how courts have handled challenges to SSB laws is that regulators can run greater risks of having their laws struck down if they are too timid,” Studdert said.

“Courts weigh effectiveness, and modest attempts to change behavior are often ineffective,” he said. “So one piece of advice regulators in this area should consider is to ‘go big or go home’.”