Diets – UNICEF DATA

As infants grow, their nutritional needs change rapidly. At 6 months of age, it is recommended that children begin eating their first solid foods while continuing to breastfeed until age 2 or older to ensure that their nutrient intake is sufficient to fuel their brain and their developing body. In fact, the nutritional requirements for growth and development of children aged 6 to 23 months are higher per kilogram of body weight than at any other time in life. Therefore, frequent feeding with a variety of foods is important to ensure that nutritional needs are met. However, data shows that globally, most children aged 6 to 23 months are not fed according to global recommendations.

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Far too many children are not fed at the right time or with the right frequency and do not benefit from the dietary diversity necessary to grow and develop fully. More than one in four children aged 6 to 8 months (28%) did not receive any solid, semi-solid or soft foods – the indicator being called solid, semi-solid or soft food introduction. One in two children aged 6 to 23 months (50 percent) did not receive the minimum recommended number of meals or snacks each day – the metric known as minimum meal frequency. More than two in three children aged 6 to 23 months (69 percent) were not fed foods from at least five of the eight recommended food groups – the indicator called minimum dietary diversity. Despite the recommendation that children aged 6 to 23 months should be fed eggs, fish or meat daily, more than half of children (53%) did not consume any of these nutrient-rich foods at course of the previous day – the indicator refers to the consumption of eggs and/or meat. Additionally, nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables are lacking in the diets of too many young children. Globally, more than 2 in 5 (41%) children aged 6 to 23 months did not eat any fruit or vegetables in the previous day.

The data is sounding the alarm on the child food poverty crisis – a condition in which young children do not receive the bare minimum of food groups they need during early childhood. Today, in low- and middle-income countries, 2 out of 3 children under the age of five – or 478 million – suffer from food poverty. Even more worrying, one in three children under the age of five – or 202 million – live in extreme food poverty, meaning they are fed an extremely poor diet that includes at most two food groups, often cereals and maybe milk. Some regions face greater challenges than others: one in three children in South Asia, West and Central Africa, and East and Southern Africa live in extreme food poverty. And unfortunately, the prevalence of severe food poverty among children has remained the same throughout the last decade.

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