Efetividade do Programa do Leite na recuperação de crianças desnutridas moradoras de favelas de Maceió

Abstract

In the current context of health in developing countries, malnutrition persists as a problem of great magnitude, especially in children under five due to the persistence of the chronic form and relation with high rates of infant morbidity. This nutritional grievance mainly affects people exposed to food and nutritional insecurity and to unfavorable environmental conditions, being characterized as a social disease responsible for high mortality rates. Because of the drama of the poor, developing countries like Brazil since the postwar period have been trying to control hunger and malnutrition through social policies that include welfare character measures, highlighting the distribution of food to reduce child malnutrition. Moreover, few attempts to evaluate programs which combat hunger and malnutrition in Brazil were done among the beneficiary population. For these reasons, this study investigated the effectiveness of nutritional education associated with the supplementary consumption of milk to promote chronically malnourished children growth. The study involved 208 children with nutritional risk and malnutrition, randomly distributed among three groups (G1, G2 and G3). Children belonging to G1 and G2 were fed with milk, but only those of the G1 were subjected to nutritional education. The G3 children were neither users of the program, nor subjected to education. The end of the study, it was observed a significant increase in height (p<0.05) in G1 and G2. Children at nutritional risk differed significantly from G1 to G2 and G3, which in turn, were statistically identical. From the analysis of the evolutionary chart, there was again a positive trend in nutritional recovery of G1, when comparing with the others. For the G3 there was no satisfactory outcome, their average heights remained almost unchanged. It was concluded that despite the precarious socio-economic conditions of the families, nutritional education associated with the distribution of milk, contributed to the increase of about 0.2 z scores for EI during the study. The intervention examined in the final time showed that it was especially effective to G1, highlighting the importance of the continuous nutritional education to preventing malnutrition.