Increased birthweight after prenatal dietary supplementation of rural African women

Abstract

Birthweight data from 197 rural Gambian women who received an energy-dense prenatal dietary supplement over a 4-y period (net intake = 430 kcal/d) was compared with data from 182 women from 4 baseline years. Preintervention birthweights averaged 2944 +/- 43 (SEM) g when women were in positive energy balance during the dry harvest season (pregnancy weight gain greater than 1200 g/mo). Birthweights decreased to 2808 +/- 41 g (p less than 0.01) in the wet season when food shortages and agricultural work caused negative energy balance (weight gain less than 500 g/mo). There were no detectable secular trends in the baseline data. Supplementation was ineffective during the dry season but highly effective during the wet season: +225 +/- 56 g, p less than 0.001 (unadjusted) or +200 +/- 53 g, p less than 0.001 (adjusted for sex, season, and parity) by between-child multiple regression analysis; +231 +/- 65 g, p less than 0.001 by within-mother analysis. The proportion of low-birthweight babies (less than 2501 g) decreased from 23.7-7.5%, p less than 0.002. The observed threshold effect emphasizes the importance of selective targeting of interventions to truly at-risk groups.

Impact of targeted food supplementation on pregnancy weight gain and birth weight in rural Bangladesh: an assessment of the Bangladesh Integrated Nutrition Program (BINP)

“…Lighter women gained relatively more weight during their pregnancy than heavier women, a result in keeping with other studies in East Java, Indonesia (19) , Pakistan (20) and Taipei, Republic of China (21) . The present study showed that supplementation had an insignificant effect on birth weight and LBW, in keeping with some studies (22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27) , while other studies have reported a significant impact of supplementation on birth weight (12,(28)(29)(30)(31)(32) . The most recent food supplementation trial on undernourished women from the Gambia (12) reported considerably larger effects on birth weight.…”

Ethnic differences in the relationship between fasting leptin and BMI in children

“…Detailed descriptions of environmental and nutritional conditions in this area can be found elsewhere. 6,7 The children recruited into the study were born during the first 2 y of the West Kiang maternal dietary supplementation study, 8 and at the time of recruitment were aged between 6 and 10 y. The original Italian study had data from 1929 Italian children aged 3-18 y from three provinces in central Italy (Perugia, Terni, Rieti).…”

High fat versus high carbohydrate nutritional supplementation: a one year trial in stunted rural Gambian children

“…The population and environmental conditions of these villages have already been described in detail (Prentice et al, 1987). The study covered a period of 15 months (3 months to complete the baseline measurements and 12 months of supplementation).…”

“…Groups were thus also matched for season. Children in the groups F and C were supplemented with biscuits containing different proportions of rice,¯our, roasted groundnuts, sugar, vegetable oil and honey based on a recipe used to supplement pregnant women in previous studies (Prentice et al, 1983;Prentice et al, 1987). The proportion of the different ingredients was modi®ed to obtain 63% (high fat biscuit) or 25% (high CHO biscuit) of energy from fat.…”