Nutrition Awareness: Family Practices in Indonesian Borderland

Abstract

Poor family nutritional practice is one of the major leading causes of stunting in children aged 0-59 months. Good family nutrition practices are one of the primary keys to stunting prevention. It can also reduce the prevalence of stunting and the impact it has on families, which are included in the category of stunting risk families. This study aimed to investigate nutrition-aware family practices at Haliwen Health Center, Atambua-one of the border areas of the Republic of Indonesia (RI) and Democratic Republic of Timor Leste (DRTL). It is a descriptive study with a cross-sectional design that took place at the Haliwen Health Center, Belu Regency, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia, from September 1 to October 30, 2021. A total of 147 families with children aged 0-59 months, were selected by purposive sampling. Most mothers (60%) gave exclusive breastfeeding to infants aged 0-6 months. Most mothers (78%) firstly gave complementary feeding to infants at the age of 6 months, most families and children (94%) ate a variety of nutritional sources, most families (56%) used iodized salt, most infants (95%) aged 6-11 months and children 12-59 months received vitamin A supplements, most (88%) pregnant women received iron supplement at least 90 tablets during pregnancy, most postpartum women (72%) received two capsules of vitamin A supplements. 58.5% of families at the Haliwen Health Center had implemented 75% nutrition-aware family indicators. However, none of them had performed 100% nutrition-aware family indicators. Sustainable assistance needs to be improved to reach 100% nutrition-aware family and implemented in all families.

Health Indicators for Accelerating Stunting Reduction: Family Practices in Indonesian Borderland

“…The results showed that most mothers gave exclusive breastfeeding to infants aged 0-6 months. Exclusive breastfeeding means the baby gets only breast milk without any additional food (except medicines, vitamins and minerals) until six months (Binns et al, 2020;Hadi et al, 2022;Nahak et al, 2022). Breast milk is the primary source of food for newborns up to 6 months of age (Ahmad et al, 2015;Beal et al, 2018;Gannon et al, 2020).…”

“…Breast milk contains carbohydrates, water, fat, protein and essential nutrients that contribute to the growth and development of toddlers (Ahmad et al, 2015). Exclusive breastfeeding has been proven to reduce the risk of stunting effectively (Hijra et al, 2016;Badriyah and Syafiq, 2017;Uwiringiyimana et al, 2019;Binns et al, 2020;Nur et al, 2021;Hadi et al, 2022;Nahak et al, 2022). It is because breast milk contains nutrients for physical development and antibodies, thereby reducing morbidity and the incidence of infection in infants.…”

“…It means that family health practices are a determinant of stunting. Good family health practices are the primary key to reducing the prevalence of stunting and vice versa (Nahak et al, 2022). Family-based intervention is proven scientifically efective in preventing growth retardation in children under five (Rahayu et al, 2017;Ramadhan et al, 2022) According to the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Indonesia report in 2018, the stunting rate in Indonesia was 30.8% (The Ministry of Health of Indonesia, 2018b).…”

“…For people in border areas, the urgency of this problem is evident with difficult access to information that results in insufficient knowledge about good family health practices (Nahak et al, 2022). Furthermore, this research is essential because an illustration of the situation of border people becomes valid data in setting policies for accelerating stunting reduction.…”

Prevalence and Behavior of Nutrition Aware Families Related with the Incidence of Stunting in Todller

“…Nutrition-aware families have five indicators: weighing regularly, breastfeeding exclusively, consuming diverse foods (balanced nutrition), consuming iodized salt, and taking supplements as recommended (UGM, 2019). Five indicators of Nutrition-aware behavior from the results of the study have been shown to contribute to the incidence of stunting in children (Lindawati et al, 2023;Rosalina et al, 2023;Berawi et al, 2022;Nahak et al, 2022;Fitriah et al, 2021). Another study shows that there is a contribution to Nutrition-aware family indicators, namely weight weighing in Posyandu (Prasetyani et al, 2023), exclusive breastfeeding (Lindawati et al, 2023;Hadi et al, 2022), feeding practices (Quamme &;Iversen, 20220;Gunawan et al, 2022), iodized salt consumption (Abbag et al, 2021;Gunawan et al, 2022), Fe and vitamin A supplements (Silaban et al, 2022), against the incidence of stunting in children.…”