The role of diet in ECD: Evidence from Nepal

Good nutrition is critical for early childhood development, which has multiple facets including social, cognitive, emotional, and physical development. While stunting in early childhood has been used in the past as a proxy for the measurement of early childhood development, field-friendly tools now exist to directly measure the different facets of early childhood development in low and middle income countries.

Participants in this webinar, hosted by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition, learned more about the relationship between household and child factors, including diet quality, consumption of animal source foods, and anthropometry, to the early development of young Nepali children. Experiences administering an early childhood development tool in the context of surveys in rural Nepal were also shared.

Moderator:

Dr. Irwin Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of Nutrition and Medicine at Tufts University's USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Speakers:

• Dr. Andrew Thorne-Lyman is an Associate Scientist and Nutrition Epidemiologist in the Center for Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

• Dr. Laurie C. Miller is Professor of Pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, Adjunct Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School for Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Child Development at the Eliot Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University (Boston, USA).

• Dr. Merina Shrestha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal.

• Dr. Shibani Ghosh is Research Associate Professor at Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She is also the Associate Director for the Innovation Lab for Nutrition with experience working in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.