How Cultural Practices Contribute to Malnutrition

In certain Congolese communities, women (unlike men) are forbidden to eat dog meat or snakes. Women are warned that if they eat snake meat, for example, their chests will flatten and grow scales.

Most Americans manage to live their lives without ever feasting on puppies or reptiles, so this African tradition seems harmless enough. But when women in many of these communities become pregnant, they are forbidden also to eat meat of any sort, and eggs are taboo as well because they are said to cause egg-shaped children. At a time when women need protein so that their unborn children can grow sturdily to proper birth size, protein is taken away from them. When Action Against Hunger arrives in such communities to cure malnutrition, we strive to sympathize even while we work to change centuries of misguided tradition. Sometimes we succeed.

Similar to Jewish and Islamic laws that were designed to keep the faithful from eating pigs and contracting trichinosis, certain food customs in isolated communities evolved rationally. In some villages, for example, women without access to medical assistance will reduce meal sizes during their final months of pregnancy. They know this will lead to undersized babies, but that's the point: The women hope for easier births that won't require a physician's care. The fact that the mothers and their newborns will be dangerously malnourished is a secondary consideration.

In southern Sudan, farmers consider their cattle to be valuable assets, so farmers treat them gently to keep them healthy. When workers for Action Against Hunger explain how much more productive the farmers' harvests could be if their cattle helped pull plows, the farmers resist, preferring smaller yields to putting their cattle to work at tasks that could cause injury to their assets. The obvious result is a reduction of nourishing food for their families and neighbors.

For another example, in certain Tajikistan villages, new mothers are kept indoors for one month after giving birth. The community enforces this rule, even when a mother or child becomes ill. If medical assistance can't come to the family's home, the illness—often related to malnutrition—isn't professionally treated.

One of the thorniest paths to adequate nourishment for children worldwide has to do with attitudes that govern breastfeeding. Most cultures have such socially accepted practices, even industrialized nations. In the United States, for example, the acceptability of breastfeeding seems to change every generation or so. Current medical opinion claims that infants should be breastfed for at least the first year of life. Some cultures frown on breastfeeding a child who is older than six months, even though a longer regimen than six months is likely to produce healthier children.

In the developing world, numerous cultures mistrust colostrum. During the first three or four days after a child is born, the mother's breasts produce colostrum, a low-fat milk that's high in antibodies, carbohydrates, and protein. Colostrum is easily digestible, and the nutrition it contains is highly concentrated. Nature has designed it to jump-start a baby's digestive system and protect the child from disease. In addition, when children suckle colostrum, the action helps prevent engorgement of the mother's breasts and prompts them to produce milk more abundantly in the following weeks and months.

But it's thinner and more yellow than the milk that comes later, and many cultures are suspicious of it. Until a mother's milk becomes more "normal," they believe that breastfeeding their children is unhealthy, though in fact newborns benefit more from colostrum than from any other food they could be given.

Often, breastfeeding teams organized by Action Against Hunger are able to change community opinions about colostrum. In one culture, for example, herders periodically lead their livestock away from their homes in search of food and water, but traditionally a herder will leave one animal behind for each member of his family. Sometimes this leads to female livestock being separated from their newborns. When this happens, no matter how the newborn is nourished, it grows with less hardiness than if it had fed on its mother's colostrum, and villagers know it. When our teams point out that the same debility can result from human mothers depriving their newborns of colostrum, understanding often dawns and minds are changed.

When our teams enter a new area, they can be confronted with earning a community's trust while simultaneously convincing everyone that certain traditional practices are in fact contributing to their distress. It's always a delicate issue. Fortunately, we seldom need to talk anyone into eating snakes.