Importance of Nutrition to the MDGS - Essay Example

Chapter questions Importance of nutrition to the MDGs Nutrition is important in facilitating a number of millennium development goals such as managing child mortality rates and improving women’s health during their pregnancy periods (Skolnik, 163). Some of the direct and indirect causes of under nutritionDirect causes of undernutrition are shortage of food that leads to intake of insufficient amount of nutrients and energy from consumed quantity of food and consumption of food of a poor quality that has insufficient levels of nutrients and energy.

Repeated cases of infections in the body are however indirect causes of undernutrition and impair body functionality, including the ability to digest and assimilate nutrients and energy into the body (Skolnik, 165, 166). Links between nutrition and healthThe link between nutrition and health is the effect of malnutrition that leads to illness in a child’s life, during childhood and later in adulthood. Children who are undernourished are more susceptible to illness that adversely affects their health.

Malnutrition also leads to terminal diseases such as “diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol” in a child’s later stage of life (Skolnik, 167). Similarly, malnutrition increases women’s risks of pregnancy-related deaths besides premature births and births of unhealthy children (Skolnik, 167). Parts of the world with the worst nutritional problemsThe parts of the world that experience the worst nutritional problems are Sub-Saharan Africa, Mid and North Africa, and South Asia.

This is because the regions report the highest cases of deaths, “underweight” and “low birth weights” that are related to nutritional problems (Skolnik, 170, 171). The link between nutrition and economic developmentThe link between nutrition and economic development is the role of nutrition in empowering people toward economic development. Nutrition facilitates cognitive and physiological potentials that determine people’s abilities toward economic development. Poor nutrition however undermines the ability and identifies poor economic development (Skolnik, 173).