Saha, M.; Ng, H.; Odjidja, E.N.; Saha, M.; Olivier, P.; McCaffrey, T.A.; Thilsted, S.H. Small Fish Big Impact: Improving Nutrition during Pregnancy and Lactation, and Empowerment for Marginalized Women. Nutrients2024, 16, 1829.
Saha, M.; Ng, H.; Odjidja, E.N.; Saha, M.; Olivier, P.; McCaffrey, T.A.; Thilsted, S.H. Small Fish Big Impact: Improving Nutrition during Pregnancy and Lactation, and Empowerment for Marginalized Women. Nutrients 2024, 16, 1829.
Saha, M.; Ng, H.; Odjidja, E.N.; Saha, M.; Olivier, P.; McCaffrey, T.A.; Thilsted, S.H. Small Fish Big Impact: Improving Nutrition during Pregnancy and Lactation, and Empowerment for Marginalized Women. Nutrients2024, 16, 1829.
Saha, M.; Ng, H.; Odjidja, E.N.; Saha, M.; Olivier, P.; McCaffrey, T.A.; Thilsted, S.H. Small Fish Big Impact: Improving Nutrition during Pregnancy and Lactation, and Empowerment for Marginalized Women. Nutrients 2024, 16, 1829.
Abstract
Undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies such as anemia are considered significant public health challenges in Bangladesh, which enhancing fish consumption is a well-established food-based intervention to address these. This paper documents the establishment of community-based fish chutney production and reports the impact of its consumption on mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) and hemoglobin (Hb) levels among targeted 150 pregnant and lactating women (PLW) in rural Bangladesh. A fish chutney was developed using locally available ingredients followed by a series of laboratory tests, including nutrient composition, shelf-life and food safety. A community-based fish chutney production process was designed to: 1) supply locally available ingredients for processing; 2) establish two fish drying sites; 3) initiate a community-based production site, and 4) distribute fish chutney to PLW by six women nutrition field facilitators for one year. Then a pre- and post-intervention study was designed for a selected 150 PLW to receive 30g of fish chutney daily for 12 months. Differences in mean mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) and hemoglobin (Hb) levels pre- and post-consumption were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance. Consumption of 30g of fish-chutney resulted in significant increases of the mean values of Hb levels and MUAC among the targeted PLW.
Keywords
First 1000 days of life; anemia; pregnant and lactating women; women empowerment; community-based intervention; food-based intervention
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public Health and Health Services
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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