Philippines

Resilient Cities urban nutrition profile: Philippines

Child stunting is a persistent problem in the Philippines. While stunting prevalence is higher in rural than in urban areas, it still affects one in four children under the age of five in urban areas and coexists with rising overweight in school-age children, adolescents, and adults. Some urban nutrition interventions have focused on reducing diet-related noncommunicable disease (NCD) risks, but they have not addressed the challenges of the double burden of malnutrition (DBM) (e.g., the coexistence of problems of undernutrition and overnutrition) in school-age children and adolescents. Likewise, the lack of evidence on interventions in the urban food environment (FE) signals a need for studies to better understand the role of FEs in driving unhealthy dietary changes and the DBM and to test approaches to shift consumption patterns toward healthier diets and lifestyles. NCDs are the leading cause of mortality in the Philippines, and NCD risks are higher in urban areas than rural ones. National policies support nutrition with multisectoral approaches, particularly through urban farming and gardening to promote healthy and affordable urban diets. Yet the urban-specific programs must be evaluated. Evaluations of urban agricultural initiatives are needed to document any impact on diets and nutrition and to assess the potential for scale up, especially given land scarcity in dense urban areas. Additionally, multisectoral double-duty actions must be developed to address all forms of malnutrition.

Intrahousehold food distribution in the Philippines: A food share over energy share perspective

An ex-ante analysis of the impact of biofortified zinc rice on dietary zinc inadequacy: Evidence from Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines

Background: South, East, and Southeast Asia are among the regions of the world with the highest estimated prevalence of inadequate zinc intake. Because populations in those regions eat rice as their main staple, zinc biofortification of rice can potentially improve zinc intake, especially among the most vulnerable. Objectives: We modeled the impact of the consumption of zinc-biofortified rice on zinc intake and inadequacy among women of childbearing age and young children nationally in Indonesia, the Philippines, and at a subnational level in Bangladesh. Methods: We conducted an ex-ante analysis by applying increments of zinc content in rice, from a baseline level of 16 parts per million (ppm) to 100 ppm, and based on rice consumption data to substitute levels of conventional rice with zinc-biofortified rice varying between 10% and 70%. Results: Among all datasets evaluated from these 3 countries, the prevalence of dietary zinc inadequacy at baseline was 94%–99% among women of childbearing age, 77%–100% among children 4–5 y old, and 27%–78% among children 1–3 y old. At the current breeding target of 28 ppm, zinc-biofortified rice has the potential to decrease zinc inadequacy by ≤50% among women and children in rural Bangladesh and among children in the Philippines where consumption of rice is higher compared with Indonesia. Conclusions: Our analysis shows that increasing zinc content in rice ≤45 ppm reduces the burden of zinc inadequacy substantially, after which we encourage programs to increase coverage to reach the highest number of beneficiaries.