Linking Nutrition and Health: Progress and Opportunities

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In the last few years, there has been an unprecedented global effort to scale up maternal and child nutrition. The effort is prompted by increasing recognition of the devastating and largely irreversible impact of undernutrition on children in the 1,000-day window from pregnancy to age two — and by a growing consensus on a set of evidence-based, cost-effective nutrition interventions. The United States has been a leader in the global effort and has made maternal and child nutrition improvements a primary objective of its Feed the Future and Global Health initiatives.

Nutrition has been an issue neglected for far too long, so the recent attention to maternal and child nutrition creates a unique opportunity to make progress. Scaling up and making meaningful, measurable progress against malnutrition will require both additional resources and new ways of working. It will mean supporting national nutrition strategies that are country-owned and -driven, ensuring coordination across sectors to improve nutrition outcomes, and investing in human and institutional capacity to scale up at the global and country levels. Leveraging linkages among nutrition, health, and agriculture sectors can signifi cantly increase the benefi ts of nutrition investments.

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