The Program in International Nutrition at Cornell University - Issue #36
Dear all,
We hope you are all well. Please find below this week’s updates in and around the Program in International Nutrition. Thank you.
Best wishes,
Saurabh and the PIN Team
Fall PIN Seminar
Join us this week for our final seminar of the semester:
“Effective Interventions to Improve Breastfeeding Practices: Learning from the East Asia Pacific Region”
Jennifer Cashin, MPH
Regional Associate Director for Programs
Alive and Thrive East Asia Pacific
November 17, 2022, 11:30AM - 12:30AM EST on Zoom
Meeting ID: 929 6822 5578 | Passcode: 038687
Thank you to all of our Fall PIN Seminar Speakers!
PIN Podcast
Catch our New Interview! — pin.transistor.fm
Dr. Mercy Gloria Lung’aho joins the PIN Podcast to tell us about her work as Research Scientist at International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, Nigeria. The Program in International Nutrition from Cornell University interviews leaders and rising stars in the field of nutrition and public health. Listen to all of our episodes here!
Other Seminars and Events of Interest
Division of Nutritional Sciences | Cornell College of Human Ecology — www.human.cornell.edu
November 22, 2022, 11:30 AM EST. Virtual
"Role of epigenetic variability at metastable epialleles for the risk to develop diseases like obesity" Peter Kühnen, PH.D, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
COP27 Health Pavilion — www.who.int
WHO in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and partners is hosting the Health Pavilion at the COP27 UN Climate Conference, taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt from November 6-18, 2022. Check out all of the COP27 WHO Health and Science briefs here, including the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture.
In the News
Healthy 2022 World Cup — www.who.int
WHO and the State of Qatar have teamed up with FIFA on the Healthy 2022 World Cup project. An objective of the project is to promote and protect healthy food and healthy food environments by focusing on healthy diets in and around sports stadia involved in the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ and hundreds of schools; and at community level, by developing, implementing, monitoring and enforcing comprehensive policy for healthy, safe and sustainable food.
WHO Nutrition and Food Safety News — www.who.int
The present issue of the quarterly NFS newsletter features the “summer cocktail” of WHO activities in the following key areas: Covid-19 and nutrition, Food Security, Food Procurement, Food Safety, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition, Breastfeeding and Formula Milk marketing, Salt iodization and Sodium intake reduction, Microplastics, and the Transformation of Food Systems.
Publications from the PIN Community
Precision Nutrition for Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Hype or Hope? - Sight and Life Special Report — sightandlife.org
In the past decade, significant technological advances have increasingly made a case against the use of a one-size-fits-all approach in public health nutrition. Instead, new concepts, including Precision Nutrition (PN), have surfaced in high-income countries with considerable potential to transform current public health nutrition interventions and improve nutritional outcomes. But where do low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) fit in the picture?
This Sight and Life Special Report is a first attempt to bring awareness to this issue.
Point-of-Need Diagnostics Across the Nutrition Value Chain
Saurabh Mehta, Balaji Srinivasan, David Erickson
Point-of-need (PON) diagnostics (Dx) are field-friendly diagnostic testing tools that can be used by anyone, anywhere. These PON Dx are a critical component of a PN technology that can be implemented across the food value chain from farm to fork to optimize food quality, safety and health. In the following article you will learn about the potential of PON Dx for nutrient quality assessment, food safety testing as well as evaluating nutrition status.
Dewey KG, Arnold CD, Wessells KR, Prado EL, Abbeddou S, Adu-Afarwuah S, Ali H, Arnold BF, Ashorn P, Ashorn U, Ashraf S, Becquey E, Brown KH, Christian P, Colford JM, Dulience SJL, Fernald LCH, Galasso E, Hallamaa L, Hess SY, Humphrey JH, Huybregts L, Iannottie LL, Jannat K, Lartey A, Port AL, Leroy JL et al.
Meta-analyses show that small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS) reduce child wasting and stunting. There is little information regarding effects on severe wasting or stunting.
Strengthening causal inference from randomised controlled trials of complex interventions
Leroy JL, Frongillo EA, Kase BE, Alonso S, Chen M, Dohoo I, Huybregts L, Kadiyala S, Saville NM.
Researchers conducting randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of complex interventions face design and analytical challenges that are not fully addressed in existing guidelines. The key challenge is how to manage the multiplicity of outcomes required for the trial while minimising false positive and false negative findings. To address this challenge, we formulate three principles to conduct RCTs.
Avula R, Nguyen PH, Ashok S, Bajaj S, Kachwaha S, Pant A, Walia M, Singh A, Paul A, Singh A, Kulkarni B, Singhania D, Escobar-Alegria J, et al.
Modeling studies estimated severe impacts of potential service delivery disruptions due to COVID-19 pandemic on maternal and child nutrition outcomes. We studied disruptions and restorations, challenges and adaptations in health and nutrition service delivery by frontline workers in India during COVID-19 in 2020.
Sanghvi T, Nguyen PH, Ghosh S, Zafimanjaka M, Walissa T, Karama R, Mahmud Z, Tharaney M, Escobar-Alegria J, Dhuse EL, Kim SS.
This paper elucidates how we used information and data to contextualize a package of globally recommended maternal nutrition interventions (micronutrient supplementation, weight gain monitoring, dietary counselling and counselling on breastfeeding) and describes four country-specific health service delivery models.