Rs 20 recipes suggested to make children healthy

| | New Delhi
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Rs 20 recipes suggested to make children healthy

Monday, 18 November 2019 | PNS | New Delhi

Rs 20 recipes suggested to make children healthy

Cooked food like uttapam and sprouted dal paratha can help tackle obesity in kids while those suffering with malnutrition or anemia should be given calorie-rich food like potato-stuffed paratha, paneer kathi roll and sago cutlets.

These are some of the affordable freshly prepared foods, costing as low as Rs 20, that the UNICEF has suggested for Indian kids, reeling under the twin health issues, through its 28-page booklet.

The book is based on the findings of the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey 2016-18 which found that 35 per cent of children under five are stunted, 17 per cent are wasted and 33 per cent are underweight. Apart from calorie count, the book gives detailed break up of protein, carbohydrate, fat, total fibre, iron, vitamin C and calcium content of the recipe.

UNICEF chief Henrietta H Fore said the booklet aims to tell people what is nutritious and in what amount. She said there are two stages in a person’s life when nutrition is extremely important. “The first is in the first 1,000 days of a child and for that we need to reach young mothers and second is when you are in adolescence and for that we need to go into schools,” Fore said.

“The first one would require healthcare workers at hospitals. It is at that time you can teach a young mother about nutrition and the second one is at adolescence when it can be communicated through teachers, knowledge of nutritious food needs to be brought into schools and made part of the curriculum,” the UNICEF executive director said.

She said these types of brochures aim to remind what one should have in a packed lunch for a child. “If every parent also has that knowledge then we will all be better in terms of what we know about nutrition and how we actually feed ourselves,” she said.

Fore further said the book needs to be brought into schools and made part of the curriculum. “So that there is good nutrition and I think national nutrition plans will incorporate this but we at UNICEF will be by their side and working with them on a good communication plan,” she said.

The book also talks about eating disorders like anorexia — voluntary self-starvation resulting in emaciation — and bulimia-recurrent episodes of binge eating followed by some kind of compensatory behaviour to prevent weight gain.

As per the Government survey, anaemia affects 40 per cent of adolescent girls and 18 per cent of adolescent boys. The report also found that overweight and obesity increasingly begins in childhood with a growing threat of non-communicable diseases like diabetes (10 per cent) in school-aged children and adolescents.

To reduce malnutrition among children, the Modi Government has launched flagship Poshan Abhiyan or the National Nutrition Mission. It aims for a 25 per cent fall in the prevalence of child stunting and a three-percentage-point annual decline in the prevalence of anaemia among women and children under the age of five years of age by 2022.

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