More than two billion people in the developing world suffer from a lack of micronutrients—like vitamin A, sodium, iron and calcium. The result for children can be brain damage, stunted growth, and even death.
In response, food and farming programs have begun to consider how to do more than just increase production of staple crops, like rice and corn, to fight malnutrition. There is a growing global awareness that the fight against hunger requires getting people a larger range of nutrients needed to thrive.
The new study, led by a team at the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Environment, examined data on children's diets from 43,000 households across four continents. They found that being close to forests caused children to have at least 25% greater diversity in their diets compared to kids who lived farther away from forests.
"This is a powerful, actionable result," says Taylor Ricketts, director of UVM's Gund Institute and senior author on the paper. "It's comparable to the impacts of some nutrition-focused agricultural programs."
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