From Africa to Appalachia, improved relationships and communication through nutrition research

 From Africa to Appalachia, Stephanie L. Martin’s, PhD, CLC research on nutrition during pregnancy, lactation, and childhood, has gone beyond nutrition alone.

In a world where infant feeding is commonly reduced to input and output, “perfect” latches and weighted feeds, Martin’s work illuminates the added benefit of improved relationships and communication. 

In Zambia for instance, Martin and her colleagues have looked at how to engage family members to support nutrition in women living with HIV and their children. 

Twenty years ago, when antiretroviral therapy (ART) was less accessible, the risk of transmitting HIV through breastfeeding was high. Today though, with an increase in availability and access to ART, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of antiretroviral drugs as a safe way to prevent postnatal transmission of HIV through breastfeeding. 

Still, Martin has found that mothers talk about their fears of transmitting HIV to their infants the same way they did two decades ago. Mothers often use unfounded strategies like breastfeeding for shorter durations, breastfeeding less often or offering other liquids in an effort to limit the risk of transmission. So, Martin and her team have counseled mothers not to cut feedings short. Martin shares that her most recent Lactation Counselor Training has offered new insight.

“I’m going to change things in our counseling materials based on what we learned in the CLC training [in regard to] how we phrase things about breastfeeding for longer periods of time; if there is efficient milk transfer, we don’t need to focus on this longer length of time,” she explains.   

Additionally, in an effort to reduce caregivers offering infants under six months food or drink other than breastmilk, alternative soothing recommendations were offered. Martin remembers one mother who tried the suggestions to calm her crying baby. The mother reported that propping her infant onto a specific shoulder alleviated the baby’s discontent. “I don’t know what it was about that shoulder, but she stopped crying,” Martin quotes the mother, noting the importance of empowering mothers and caregivers through counseling. 

In Tanzania, Martin and partners at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College sought to identify  facilitators and barriers to exclusive breastfeeding among women working in the informal sector. And in Kenya, Martin and colleagues have worked to improve adolescent nutrition in informal settlements.

Martin pictured with colleagues from Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College and Better Health for the African Mother and Child organization

Throughout all of her work in East and Southern Africa, Martin says they are reliant on community health workers to roll out their programs. 

“It’s so important to understand their experiences,” Martin says of hearing out the helpers. 

Through her research , Martin has explored the experiences of peer educators, community health workers, WIC breastfeeding peer counselors, health care providers, and program implementers.

Surveying global health professionals provides an opportunity to learn from their experiences and fill gaps in the peer-reviewed literature to strengthen intervention design and implementation as concluded in Martin, et al’s Experiences Engaging Family Members in Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Nutrition: A Survey of Global Health Professionals

Through Facilitators and Barriers to Providing Breastfeeding and Lactation Support to Families in Appalachia: A Mixed-Methods Study With Lactation Professionals and Supporters, Martin draws parallels in the challenges lactation care providers in Africa and Appalachia face, including compensation and availability of services. 

Specifically in Appalachia, the authors heard lactation care providers expressing the desire for additional training for providing support around mental health, chest feeding, drug use, etc. 

Martin says that she found the Lactation Counselor Training Course (LCTC) covered many of these topics. 

“[The course] seemed very intentional in all of the right ways,” she says. 

The Appalachian Breastfeeding Network (ABN) also offers an Advanced Current Concepts in Lactation Course which covers these desired topics with scholarship opportunities. 

When asked if she’s optimistic about the future of maternal child health, Martin answers with a slightly tense laugh: “I feel like I have to say yes.” Martin goes on to explain the inspiring work of ABN and all of the lactation care providers she’s interacted with.

“If they were in charge of the world, it would be such a better place,” she begins. 

“When I think about them, I feel optimistic. I’d like to see different laws that are supportive of women’s health and families. We have all the right people to make positive changes.”

Centering and celebrating cultures in health: Dietary Guidelines for infants and toddlers for Chinese and Vietnamese communities

During the first week of April each year, the American Public Health Association (APHA) brings together communities to observe National Public Health Week. This year’s theme  is Centering and Celebrating Cultures in Health and highlights the importance of fostering cultural connections to health and quality of life. 

Last month, we celebrated National Nutrition Month, an annual campaign by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics which highlights the importance of making informed food choices across the lifespan.

Photo by Angela Roma

A beautiful example of the convergence of these two themes is work being done by the Asian Pacific Islander Breastfeeding Task Force (APIBTF) a part of  Breastfeed LA, tailoring the Dietary Guidelines for infants and toddlers for Chinese and Vietnamese communities. This project augments APIBTF’s sister organization Alameda County’s Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander (ASAP!) Breastfeeding Taskforce’s Continuity of Care (CoC) Blueprint Project Prenatal Toolkit for AANHPI families. The prenatal toolkit was adapted from an existing toolkit in Alameda County, and is available in English, traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese.

The initiative is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (CDC/DNPAO). NACCHO selected seven communities to strengthen community lactation support through the implementation of the Continuity of Care in Breastfeeding Support: A Blueprint for Communities from November 2022 to July 2023. The purpose of this project is to support the implementation of CoC strategies by local-level organizations among oppressed communities with historically low rates of chest/breastfeeding. [https://www.naccho.org/programs/community-health/maternal-child-adolescent-health/breastfeeding-support#early-childhood-nutrition]

Photo by Roderick Salatan

 

The dietary resources which include an Educational Handout from Dietary Guidelines, Nutrition Resource Directory, and social media posts can be found here, available in English, Chinese and Vietnamese. The materials include a dietary guidelines hand out with two toddler-friendly recipes (with a fun suggestion to use green onion to decorate steamed eggs), three social media messages with a timeline for infant feeding, human milk recommendations, and complementary food recommendations, all commonly eaten in Asian communities. The deliverables are full of color and easy to navigate. 

Judy Li and Cindy Young presented their work during NACCHO’s The First 1,000 Days Nutrition: Improving Nutrition Security for Infants and Toddlers in Communities of Color where the Improving Infant and Young Child Nutrition during the first 1,000 days in Communities of Color summary report was introduced. 

Li, Young and their team’s work was community-informed, standing by the sentiment, “Nothing about us, without us.” The team spoke with community members about eating habits and learned that families do not eat according to the MyPlate graphic. Instead, they enjoy their meals in family-style servings from bowls. Recipes developed were tested by community members with children and tailored according to their suggestions; for example, the addition of different dipping sauces.

Participants also offered feedback stating that they appreciated the accessibility of the ingredients. 

 

Helpful links

ASAP!’s Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Social Media Toolkit 

National Public Health Week’s shareables and toolkit (available in Spanish)  

USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2020-2025)

The Association of State Public Health Nutritionists (ASPHN) brief on Transition Feeding 

Public Health Nutrition Deserves More Attention

Undernourished and Overlooked

Breastfeeding is part of a continuum. 

–This post is part of our 10-year anniversary series “Breastfeeding is…”

Breastfeeding is part of a continuum.

It has been hypothesized that starting around nine weeks of fetal development, the pattern and sequence of intrauterine movements of the fetus seem to be a survival mechanism, which is implemented by the newborn’s patterns of movement during the first hour after birth  (described as the 9 stages)  when skin-to-skin with the mother to facilitate breastfeeding.

Photo credit United States Breastfeeding Committee

This very behavior refutes the idea that breastfeeding is “an adjunct to birth” as it is generally viewed in maternity care settings in America.

Not only are human babies hardwired to progress through 9 stages and self attach to the breast, mammalian bodies are hardwired to produce milk too.

Around 16 weeks of pregnancy, the body starts to prepare for breastfeeding. This phase, called Lactogenesis I is when colostrum begins to be created. During Lactogenesis II, the secretion of copious milk follows the hormonal shift triggered by birth and the placenta delivery. After this phase, milk production must be maintained through a supply-and-demand-like system. [Neville 2001]

Even before a pregnancy is achieved, individuals are being influenced by the infant feeding culture that surrounds them, consciously or subconsciously laying a foundation for how they feel about feeding their own babies.

Pat Hoddinott’s, et al study found that women who had seen successful breastfeeding regularly and perceived this as a positive experience were more likely to initiate breastfeeding.

Exposure to prenatal breastfeeding education also affects breastfeeding outcomes. Irene M. Rosen and colleagues found that women who attended prenatal breastfeeding classes had significantly increased breastfeeding at 6 months when compared to controls.

Photo by Luiza Brain

Mode of birth and birth experiences influence infant feeding too, for both members of the dyad.

A growing body of evidence shows that birth by cesarean section is associated with early breastfeeding cessation.

Intrapartum exposure to the drugs fentanyl and synOT is associated with altered newborn infant behavior, including suckling, while in skin-to-skin contact with mother during the first hour after birth. [Brimdyr, et al 2019]

What’s more, the authors of Intrapartum Administration of Synthetic Oxytocin and Downstream Effects on Breastfeeding: Elucidating Physiologic Pathways found “No positive relationships between the administration of synthetic oxytocin and breastfeeding.” They comment, “Practices that could diminish the nearly ubiquitous practice of inducing and accelerating labor with the use of synthetic oxytocin should be considered when evaluating interventions that affect breastfeeding outcomes.”

Photo by Olivia Anne Snyder on Unsplash

In Transdisciplinary breastfeeding support: Creating program and policy synergy across the reproductive continuum, author Miriam Labbok takes a detailed look at “the power and potential of synergy between and among organizations and individuals supporting breastfeeding, the mother-child dyad, and reproductive health to increase sustainable breastfeeding support.”

Labbok points out that a paradigm shift on the issues in the reproductive continuum – family planning, pregnancy and birthing and breastfeeding– is needed.

“These are issues that are intimately, biologically, gender linked in women’s lives, and yet ones that are generally divided up to be addressed by a variety of different professional disciplines,” Labbok begins.  “Despite the impact of child spacing on birthing success, of birthing practices on breastfeeding success, and of breastfeeding on child spacing, we are offered family planning services by a gynecologist, birth attendance by an obstetrician or midwife, and baby care by a pediatrician. Having these ‘silos’ of care, each with its own paradigm and priorities, may lead to conflicting messages, and hence, may undermine the search for mutuality in goals, and collaboration.”

One such initiative looking to deconstruct siloed care is the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative which includes standards and goals for birthing practices, for breastfeeding-friendly communities, and guidance for birth spacing, in addition to reconfirming the original Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, in recognition that breastfeeding occurs along a continuum.

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee

1,000 Days emphasizes how breastfeeding fits within the global picture as a crucial part of a whole.

In the U.S. context, the 1,000 Days initiative recognizes comprehensive health coverage, comprehensive guidelines on nutrition during pregnancy, lactation, and early childhood for women in the first 1,000 days, paid family  and medical leave policy for all workers, and investments to ensure parents and caregivers can access good nutrition as solutions to a well nation and a well world.

 

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As part of our celebration, we are giving away an online learning module with contact hours each week. Here’s how to enter into the drawings:

Email info@ourmilkyway.org with your name and “OMW is 10” in the subject line.

This week, in the body of the email, please share with us some or all of your birth stor(ies).

Subsequent weeks will have a different prompt in the blog post.

We will conduct a new drawing each week over the 10-week period.  Please email separately each week to be entered in the drawing. You may only win once. If your name is drawn, we will email a link with access to the learning module. The winner of the final week will score a grand finale swag bag.

To know is to do: retired nurse dedicates time to humanitarian aid in East Africa bringing awareness to the paradox of direness and vibrancy

Some days Susan Gold, RN, BSN, ACRN misses her ignorance. Since 2003, Gold has embarked on over 30 trips to various locations in East Africa where she teaches sexual and reproductive health and offers humanitarian aid.

Recalling one of her first visits to a clinic in Nairobi, Kenya, Gold describes a young mother, around 18-years-old, who arrived holding her severely malnourished infant against her breasts infected with such severe mastitis that her skin had split. This mother had been thrown out of her home for being HIV-positive and was breastfeeding and formula feeding her baby.

[Some background: Infant feeding has been complicated by the HIV epidemic. In the early 2000s, Gold explains that HIV-positive women were taught to formula feed to lower the risk of transmission to their babies, but with little to no access to clean water, babies were becoming severely ill. What’s more, in societies where breastfeeding is the norm, exclusive formula feeding is often an indication of one’s HIV status, which remains highly stigmatized. And formula is expensive, so many mothers choose mixed feeding, increasing the rate of HIV transmission, because formula irritates the GI system and gives the virus a pathway. By 2010, WHO issued new recommendations that stated that all mothers who tested positive should receive effective antiretroviral treatment (ART) which could lower risk of transmission during exclusive breastfeeding to virtually zero. In 2016, WHO extended the recommended duration of breastfeeding for HIV-positive mothers to 24 months. Effectiveness is dependent on consistency though, and Gold explains that mothers can develop resistance because there isn’t always access to ART.]

Gold was able to give the mother antibiotics, but the care that she and her infant required was beyond what Gold could offer. Considering the dyad’s condition and Gold’s limited resources, she says she’s certain that they died.

Reflecting on the suffering she witnessed and lives lost, that’s when Gold misses her ignorance most, but she says, “To know is to do.”

“For me it’s not a news story I can ignore, it’s names and faces,” she remarks.

In 2007, Gold received a Fulbright Grant to evaluate a reproductive health curriculum for HIV-positive adolescents. In 2017, she was awarded a Mandela Washington Fellowship Reciprocal Exchange Award to collaborate with Sicily Mburu, a Kenyan physician who co-founded AIDS No More. [Read more: https://ghi.wisc.edu/talking-health-out-loud-how-volunteering-led-to-life-saving-strategies-for-teens/]

Most recently, Gold spent several weeks in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on a Nelson Mandela Fellowship Reciprocal Exchange Fellowship Grant where she partnered with Dr. Omari Mahiza, a pediatrician at Amana Regional Referral Hospital, focusing their efforts on combating pediatric malnutrition and education on family planning.

 

Shattering stereotypes 

Gold has found that most Americans hold a “shallow view” of the continent. Her frustration with the stereotypes associated with Africa runs deep.

“It’s either starving children or a safari,” she begins. “It’s so painful for me to see that displayed so many times. There is such a tendency [in America] to dehumanize people who are not like us… We set ourselves as the standard. Their culture is not a failed attempt to be our culture. Success doesn’t have to look like us or be measured against us.”

Alongside her humanitarian work, Gold hopes to shatter the stereotypes, to bring awareness to the paradox of direness and vibrancy in East Africa.

Gold reminisces: “I love the African sun on my face, the bright colors and motion, the culture that is built around the family and friends, that you’re never expected to do it alone, the  generosity of spirit,  the sounds and smells, the warm welcomes and the optimism.”

Acutely aware of “an inherent imbalance of power” and the concept of White Saviorism, Gold uses the Swahili term Tuko sawa, which means “We are all the same”, as the foundation of her work.

We all want healthy children and families and a future with opportunities to provide long, healthy, prosperous lives, she expounds.

Beyond this core belief, Gold says that she always develops relationships with the people she works with.

“I educate myself on the origins and current status of their culture. I don’t tell people what to do, I share my experiences and expertise. I always learn from them.”

 

Doing more with less 

Ingenuity is something she’s gathered from working alongside East Africans.

For instance, Gold was struck by the engineering of incubators for very sick babies at  St. Joseph’s Hospital in Moshi, Tanzania.

If there is electricity, she explains, the heat is controlled by the number of light bulbs lit. The wood absorbs the heat, the aluminum components absorb and reflect heat, the mattress absorbs heat but also protects the baby, and the lid retains the heat but allows for monitoring of the baby. Mosquito netting is fashioned around the system.

Gold notes that Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is practiced for almost all premature babies, but it’s not common among sick babies. [Read about skin-to-skin efforts just north of Tanzania here:  https://www.ourmilkyway.org/skin-skin-gulu-uganda/]

 

Hunger: hidden and stark 

A recent Lancet Global Health Publication, Revealing the prevalence of “hidden hunger”, released estimates of two billion people worldwide with one or more micronutrient deficiencies, noting that this is a gross underestimate. The hunger and deficiencies that Gold and her colleagues witness are rarely hidden and often quite obvious.

A severely malnourished child holds onto one of the toy cars that Gold collects and brings for the children at the clinics.

Breastfeeding is important in the prevention of different forms of childhood malnutrition, including wasting, stunting, over/underweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Tanzania scores quite high in the World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative (WBTi) World Ranking.

Gold observes that all of the women breastfeed in the low-income neighborhoods she visits.

The struggle, she says, is getting enough nutrition for the women to sustain milk production and have energy to feed their babies. During her most recent visit, Gold reports that almost none of the 35 families had food in the home.

Reporters of the new estimates for micronutrient malnutrition point out that processed fortified foods and micronutrient powders can be an easy answer to hunger, but they don’t create sustainability of local and indigenous foods and create conflict of interest issues with industry.

Gold adds that low income community members can’t afford to buy industry developed foods consistently. Lack of access to clean water is also a barrier.

“And you can’t depend on outside groups to sustain you,” she continues.

“We didn’t see any processed food at all because there is no market for it,” Gold says of visiting seven different neighborhoods in the low income region of Dar es Salaam. Instead, small markets with locally-grown fruits and vegetables prevail, but access to protein is a challenge.

As medically indicated, ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) packets of fortified peanut butter issued by UNICEF are given out through health clinics. But Gold notes that sometimes parents sell these packets for money.

 

A challenge but not insurmountable 

North of Dar es Salaam, in Moshi, Gold brings a portable printer that doesn’t require Wifi to the small hospital where she volunteers. She gifts each postpartum mother a printed 4×6 photo of herself and her baby.

“You don’t know how many of these babies are going to survive due to the high infant mortality rate.”

There’s a long moment of silence between us on the video call.

Then Gold expresses her frustration and anger,  “The world can fix this, but chooses not to.”

She urges us to educate ourselves and others. Vote for people who have a vision of the world as one world, she says.

Last month, the President signed into law H.R. 4693, the “Global Malnutrition Prevention and Treatment Act of 2021,” which authorizes the United States Agency for International Development to undertake efforts to prevent and treat malnutrition globally.

For those interested in making financial contributions or donations like baby clothes, children’s  books, or toy cars, email Gold at talkinghealthoutloud@gmail.com.

Follow Gold’s organization Talking Health Out Loud on Facebook here.

For an interesting discussion on Numeracy Bias, check out this episode of Hidden Brain. Numeracy bias is described this way: “…When you see one person suffering, you feel like, ‘Oh, I can do something for that person.’ But when you hear that a whole country has a refugee crisis, you tend not to get involved because you feel like, ‘Well, this is overwhelming. I don’t think I can do anything about this, so I’m not going to engage.’…It turns out that people who have experienced a high level of lifetime adversity are immune to this bias.”

 

Other resources

Micronutrient Deficiencies

UNICEF Child Food Poverty

UNICEF No Time to Waste

UNICEF Fed to Fail

Graduate student explores complexities of nutrition and health from cradle to grave

Originally from New Orleans, Erin Bannister, lab instructor and dietetic intern at Northern Illinois University, says that food is tied to her identity.  Bannister was ten when she first learned to make a roux. Those early skills prepared her for her later work as a chef, which she describes as a kind of manual labor with long, hot hours. 

Bannister shares with a laugh, that she started to wonder how she could work with food and continue to nourish people with weekends and holidays off. Eventually, she discovered the field of dietetics.

Photo by ja ma on Unsplash

Currently in the thick of her Master’s thesis, Bannister is exploring the metabolic energy needs in adults and determining whether the default equations we use are accurate in the populations they’re used in. 

For instance, it is widely accepted that an average allowance for a roughly 170 pound man is  2,300 kcal/day; for women, it is 1,900 kcal/day. We expect that pregnant and lactating people will have higher metabolic energy needs. 

As Bannister spends a swath of her days compiling and extracting data, she says she’s discovering that some of the accepted equations need to be delineated. 

“The real root of my thesis and the root of most of my studies and the goals that I have, is to use accurate evidence-based interventions in the populations that they are meant to be used in and to not remove ourselves from that evidence,” Bannister begins. “… Often times, things are taught and then they are believed because the person that taught it is an expert and the evidence gets lost on the way; don’t forget to review the evidence.” 

As Bannister continues to pursue this idea that we can do better than sludging through the status quo, she sought out the Lactation Counselor Training Course (LCTC). Although Bannister has great interest in the complexities of nutrition and health from cradle to grave, she says that there is a solid argument that the health of a population is highly correlated with the health of its mothers. 

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC)

“[I want] to be as helpful and effective as possible… to have the knowledge to be able to contribute meaningfully, and the certification adds credibility,” she explains. “The training was quite eye-opening, almost embarrassing to say how little I knew about breastfeeding.” 

Bannister goes on that ultimately, she would like to work with nutrition intervention in low and middle income countries where the burden of improper nutrition is most severe. Currently, many countries worldwide face the double burden of malnutrition – characterized by the coexistence of undernutrition along with overweight, obesity or diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). In fact, nearly one in three people globally suffers from at least one form of malnutrition: wasting, stunting, vitamin and mineral deficiency, overweight or obesity and diet-related NCDs. (WHO 2017)

As Bannister buckles down at the end of the semester, she says, “I want to make sure I am utilizing all the forks I’ve got in the fire.” 

You can learn more about Bannister’s work by exploring the various topics she has presented on, ranging from potatoes to prison to poop. Connect with Bannister on Linkedin and Instagram @calibrating_palates.