Evaluation of Complementary Food Supplements For Reducing Childhood Undernutrition: The JiVitA-4 Study

Childhood stunting and growth faltering is highly prevalent in South Asia. Among other strategies, adequate complementary feeding practices and provision of complementary foods that are appropriate and fill the nutrient gap by providing macro and micronutrients essential for growth are important means to reduce the global burden of undernutrition and related morbidity and mortality.

We propose to evaluate the impact of three complementary food supplement products that are fortified with micronutrients in a rural, remote setting in Bangladesh, where high rates of childhood undernutrition persist on child growth, health, and development. The three foods being tested are an enhanced wheat-soy blend (WSB++) developed by WFP, and locally developed chickpea-based and a rice-based complementary food supplements.

We will assess the impact of feeding these daily against the non-fed controls, hypothesizing that the children fed these foods show increased length for age Z scores (LAZ) and weight for length age Z scores (WLZ) of >0.21 and decreased prevalence of stunting and wasting by >10%. We expect that the impact of the three foods will be equivalent/ non-inferior to that of Plumpy'Doz.