Malnutrition, Poverty, and Child Intellectual Development

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Nutrition is essential for children to develop normally. Nutrients help the brain develop, provide weight for the children, and grow healthy bones. If the child does not get the nutrients needed, it can be detrimental to the child’s growth and could cause health problems later in life. Children can also have trouble learning in school if they are not receiving the healthy amount of nutrients. The article I chose looks at malnutrition and poverty and how that affects intellectual development. In the beginning of the article “Malnutrition, Poverty and Intellectual Development,” the authors J. Larry Brown and Ernesto Politt mention a few statistics. The article states that “Globally, nearly 195 million children younger than five years are undernourished” …show more content…

In class we have been talking about the different parts of the brain and how the brain functions. This article was great because it mentions how brain development is affected if children do not get the right amount of nutrients. It was neat to see how information we are reading about in the textbook is reiterated in this article. Both the textbook and the article informs us that the brain grows at a rapid pace in the first couple of years. The article mentions what happens in the classroom when a child is malnourished. We have been learning about cognitive development so it was interesting to read how not getting enough nutrients can cause the student to do poorly in the …show more content…

It was interesting to read how the authors went about conducting the study, the results, and even the follow up of the study. Even though the text provided some knowledge regarding this project, the graphs hit home. The graphs opened my eyes about nutrition in Guatemala. The graph shows that if children got the nutrients needed then they scored the same on vocabulary tests regardless of the degree of poverty. Unfortunately, for those in a more severe degree of poverty and received lower than normal nutrients scored poorly (Brown and Pollit, 2014, p. 40). I feel this graph just proves to the readers and I that it is important to get the right amount of nutrients to succeed in the classroom regardless of the family’s economic

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