Ted Greiner

• PhD
• Professor at Hanyang University

Food-based approaches to combat vitamin A deficiency (VAD) continue to be largely ignored by governments and donor agencies. This review deals with common misperceptions as well as constraints that may lay behind this reality. First, high-dose vitamin A capsules provided to preschool age children are no solution for VAD. Second, researchers may ass...

The prevalence of vitamin A (VA) deficiency, which affects about one-third of children in developing countries, is falling only slowly. This is despite extensive distribution and administration of periodic (4– to 6-monthly) high-dose VA capsules over the past 20 years, now covering a reported 80% of children in developing countries. This massive pr...

Globally, about 50 million children less than 5 years are wasted (too thin) at any one time; of these, over 17 million are severely wasted. These children are at high risk of death or may suffer from diseases and complications that will greatly affect their future life. They need urgent effective treatment. Much more common is stunting (failure to...

How to improve iron status among infants and young children is of continued concern in low- to middle-income countries, including Brazil. In a double blind, 5-mo, home-based, randomized trial in Brazil, we gave one group of mildly anemic 6- to 24-mo-old children (n = 175) rice fortified with micronized ferric pyrophosphate using the Ultra Rice tech...

Diet and so-called dietary acid load have a significant effect on what have traditionally been called acid-base disorders and various disease states, including cancer. However, the effect has been poorly investigated, and standards of care in medical treatments for cancer patients generally do not consider monitoring acid-base disorders and resolvi...

In preparation for a talk Alan Berg was asked to give at an American Society for Nutrition meeting honoring him and celebrating his 90th birthday, as well as the 50th anniversery of the publication of his book The Nutrition Factor, he asked 11 “nutrition engineers” (experts in public health nutrition, specializing in low-income settings) 3 question...

Making contributions to reducing malnutrition entails sharing evidence and approaches among the research and practice communities, including through conferences. But who is involved in these processes, including who pays, matters both in terms of actions and optics. This paper was motivated by observations – in 2022 and historically – that the Inte...

The changing diets accompanying our modern life style have increased the content of foods that form acidic metabolic waste residues in the body. Wastes from these metabolic processes are released into the interstitial fluids and the blood, slightly changing their pH temporarily. This link may in turn have an impact on the incidence of non-communica...

Background: There is concern that advice not to drink alcohol could discourage the initiation and particularly shorten the duration of breastfeeding. However, little research has explored the impact of variously worded messages about drinking while breastfeeding on women’s intentions to drink or to breastfeed. Methods: We haphazardly allocated a co...

Moderate alcohol use by breastfeeding women appears to be relatively common. Alcohol concentrates in breast milk at levels slightly higher than in maternal blood, peaking at 30-60 minutes after consumption. Most studies find no link with the duration of breastfeeding unless drinking is fairly heavy (>2 standard drinks/day). However, seven studies h...

High dose vitamin A (HDVA) concentrate began to be distributed in India in 1970 as a short-term, stop-gap approach to reduce clinical signs of vitamin A deficiency. As this problem declined globally, the purpose of distributing them changed to the reduction of young child mortality. However, their impact on this has also declined, if not disappeare...

This is the introduction to Issue 3 for 2018 of World Nutrition, the journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association. It is not available in Research Gate's new drop down menu and thus no articles from it can be listed in Research Gate at the moment.

If you hear criticism of the UN system, the report Fit for Whose Purpose?, just published by the Global Policy Forum, may help you to understand why. The biggest, richest member governments, while telling the United Nations to achieve more, have been cutting back their core budgetary contributions. While calling for decreased fragmentation, they co...

High-dose vitamin A capsules (HDVAC) are distributed to preschool children in low-income countries on the assumption that they reduce mortality and treat vitamin A deficiency. As for other so-called magic bullet approaches, donors and policy makers consider their large-scale distribution highly cost-effective. Consequently, other ways to improve vi...

Available at https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/dont-eat-the-yellow-rice-the-danger-of-deploying-vitamin-a-golden-rice/

In rural Bangladesh, most births take place at home. There is little evidence regarding the influence of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) or community volunteers (CVs) on early infant feeding practices. We conducted a pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial in Panchagarh District to examine the effects of training and post-training supervi...

We explore the utility of a consumption coping strategy index (CSI) in characterising and assessing the factors influencing household food insecurity. We assessed 53 pastoral and 197 agro-pastoral households in Nakasongola and Nakaseke districts of Uganda, examining the use of 27 consumption coping strategies over a recall time of two 30-day period...

We explore how diet diversity differs with agricultural seasons and between households within pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihood systems, using variety of foods consumed as a less complex proxy indicator of food insecurity than benchmark indicators like anthropometry and serum nutrients. The study was in the central part of the rangelands in Uga...

This is the 50th issue of WN, which since our launch has published just over 3,500 pages. In 2014 our 11 issues averaged just over a modest 100 pages. Our 117 named authors of contributions published in the year come from many countries and all continents, and we have thanked them all, for their time, skills, wisdom and encouragement, freely given...

(These are the first 6 letters in the Feedback section attached.) In May 2010 WN published Michael Latham’s ‘The great vitamin A fiasco’. This criticises the still current global policy of treating populations of young children in countries judged to be at risk of deficiency with very high doses of vitamin A. WN then published many letters from sc...

Background Accurate measurement of the duration of exclusive breastfeeding is complicated by factors related to definitions, timing, duration of recall, methods of analysis, and sample biases. Clearly prospective methods are likely to be more accurate but are too expensive to use in most large-scale surveys. Internationally, most surveys use a poin...

The prevalence of vitamin A (VA) deficiency, which affects about one-third of children in developing countries, is falling only slowly. This is despite extensive distribution and administration of periodic (4- to 6-monthly) high-dose VA capsules over the past 20 years, now covering a reported 80% of children in developing countries. This massive pr...

Objective To examine sex differences in nutritional status in relation to feeding practices over time in a cohort of HIV-exposed children participating in a complementary feeding programme in Rwanda.Methods We applied a longitudinal design with three measurements 2–3 months apart among infants participating in a complementary feeding programme who...

Published in Solutions Journal

This chapter describes programmes that focused on dietary quality in Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, a crucial but neglected part of food and nutrition security. These programmes utilized various approaches and were all in some way successful though, as usual, valuable lessons often come from dealing with unexpected difficulties that frequently...

While WHO no longer recommends individual infant feeding counselling to HIV-positive women, it may still be practised in some settings and for specific cases. In any case, lessons can be learned by examining how well front line health workers are able to take on counselling tasks. This qualitative study was designed to assess how counsellors deal w...

Food-based approaches to combating vitamin A deficiency continue to be largely ignored by governments and donors. They may be perceived as competitive to efforts to attain high coverage of pharmaceutical supplementation. Thus they are commonly claimed to be expensive, unproven or even ineffective. To the contrary, a wide variety of common and indig...

Available at http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5294/rr/665130

Menopause is a biological aging associated phenomenon coupled with a reduction in physical fitness, and sometimes combined with emotional disturbance. Maintenance of as high level of physical fitness as possible, which has clear links to BMI and lipid profiles, is one of the methods of lessening these detrimental phenomena. Walking, its variant Nor...

Available at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/131/2/391.full/reply#pediatrics_el_55196

Available at http://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/vitamin-a-wars-the-downsides-of-donor-driven-aid/

Assess the efficacy of a 10-week consumption of guava juice on the iron status of children with mild iron deficiency anemia. Ninety-five boarding school children aged 6-9 years identified as anemic were randomly allocated to receive 300 mL of natural guava juice containing ∼200 mg of ascorbic acid (AA) or placebo (guava-flavored juice free of AA) w...

Michael Latham, a champion of public health nutrition for half a century, with a special commitment to Africa, malnutrition, human rights, and breastfeeding, died last month. The inaugural issue of World Nutrition, published a year ago, carried his commentary ‘The great vitamin A fiasco’, and this year we published his commentary ‘RUTF stuff. Can t...

Women's nutrition has received little attention in nutrition programming, even though clinical trials and intervention trials have suggested that dietary improvement or supplementation with several nutrients may improve their health, especially in low-income settings, the main focus of this paper. Most attention so far has focused on how improvemen...

These guidelines are modeled after the International Code of Monitoring of Breast-Milk Substitutes. The guidelines are followed by a series of letters discussing and criticizing them.

A recent survey in northern Mexico found that 52.8% of adult Tarahumara women were overweight. A process of “de-Indianization” of their diet was hypothesized. The present study aimed at exploring food and body shape perceptions as dimensions contributing to the role that Western accultu-ration could be playing in increasing overweight in this isola...