governmental practices with respect to taxes; antitrust 

 regulations; and trade. 



4. Nutrition 



Pregnant and lactating women, infants, and young 

 children constitute an important segment of the 

 population and the core of the serious nutrition 

 problem of the developing world. They tend to get the 

 least food or the least protein of all family members 

 and are the first to suffer and the last to recover 

 from temporary or chronic food shortages. The damage 

 that malnutrition inflicts on these populations is 

 visited upon both themselves and future generations 

 (Stein et al. 1972, Gordon 1975, Winick 1976). 



The goal is to provide each woman a diet that 

 permits her to realize her full potential as well as to 

 bear and nourish a healthy child, and each child a 

 nutritional birthright that permits full intellectual, 

 physical, and emotional development. The provision of 

 nutritional supplements to expectant women has been 

 found to reduce significantly the number of low-birth- 

 weight infants. In Guatemala, the provision of only 

 20,000 calories during the entire pregnancy reduced the 

 prevalence of low-birth-weight infants and also 

 improved the lactation performance of mothers (Klein et 

 al. 1976) . Both factors contribute to infant survival. 

 But more research is needed on such biomedical problems 

 as the functional significance of improved nutrition on 

 pregnancy, lactation, and infancy, and such behavioral 

 problems as why certain foods are or are not given to 

 infants. These needs point in turn to the need for 

 additional information on dietary requirements, dietary 

 potential in local foodstuffs, existing cultural 

 factors that influence dietary behavior, and 

 willingness or reluctance to modify this behavior. 



In almost all societies, the key to reaching ideal 

 nutritional levels revolves around women's roles in 

 making such decisions as quality of diet, allocation of 

 food within the family, and food preparation and 

 handling practices, and the broader role of women in 

 generating income, allocating time, and determining 

 expenditure patterns. Problems of household nutrition 

 are exacerbated in many rural areas by the shift toward 

 cash cropping and the reduction in variety of family 

 food formerly provided by subsistence fanning. All 

 approaches to improving nutrition must be sensitive to 

 both micro and macro roles of women amidst the dynamics 

 of change. 



Nutritional status depends on household 

 composition, family decision making, and many other 

 sociocultural and economic forces, as well as 



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