Reflections from the 22nd International Congress of Nutrition

By USAID Advancing Nutrition Project Coordinator Sharmila Mysore

A year after global leaders united in Tokyo for the 2021 Nutrition for Growth Summit, nutrition researchers and practitioners traveled to Japan’s ultramodern capital for the 22nd International Congress of Nutrition (ICN) to discuss lessons learned from implementation research that would help improve nutrition and health outcomes for our growing global population.

Tokyo brought together nutrition practitioners and public health experts for a long-awaited discussion surrounding the future of high quality nutrition programming and delivery. ICN created an ideal foundation for discussing how to build on lessons learned to reduce vulnerability to undernutrition and crises.?

From December 6–11, 16 USAID Advancing Nutrition staff presented key learnings on infant and young child feeding, micronutrient deficiencies and anemia, and healthy diets that showcase the breadth and depth of the project’s technical expertise including—?

• responding to social norms to improve maternal and child nutrition
• improving diets, nutrition, and health outcomes in food environments
• integrating responsive care and early learning into nutrition programs.

Fruitful discussions came from debating topics with others and introducing innovative and novel tools that might help others advance their own projects or refine their thinking.?

“The questions touched on sustainability, food security, compliance, and scale-up strategies—all very important to ensure [small quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements] SQ-LNS reaches children and pregnant and lactating women who need it the most,” said Nutrition and Health Systems Technical Advisor Akriti Singh after her oral presentation.

USAID Advancing Nutrition also designed two symposiums sponsored by USAID:?

At the Advancements in Methods and Tools to Support Healthy Diets symposium attendees learned about why measuring and monitoring healthy diets is critical for improving nutrition outcomes, and advances in methods and tools for doing so. The symposium also explored how the advancements contribute to global efforts to fill gaps in data collection and assessment to inform evidence-based policies and programs.

Food Systems Technical Advisor Chris Vogliano says the symposium “allowed us to illustrate the exciting advancements towards the measurement of healthy diets globally through new tools like the diet quality questionnaire (DQQ)”.

The Counseling is Complex: Approaches and Tools to Improve Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) Counseling Quality symposium facilitated discussions with 55 participants about strategies to improve IYCF counseling through better tools, capacity strengthening approaches, and supporting an enabling environment for counseling. Participants in the breakout about counseling tools talked about how tools often focus on the “what” and not the “how” in counseling.?

Attending staff also benefited from the insights of other presenters; sessions on adolescent nutrition called for focusing on healthy lifestyles and psychological development. Given the lack of data on 10–14 year olds and programming for out-of-school youth, systems thinking that responds to the interrelated determinants and causes of adolescent malnutrition is necessary. Presenters called for increased engagement of families and communities.?

A session on school nutrition programs in Viet Nam and Japan, presenters shared useful lessons from school feeding and nutrition programs in advanced economies and low- and middle-income countries. In many low- and middle-income countries, such programs are mandatory, but logistics remain challenging; however, many curricula, ranging from health and agriculture to physical education, incorporate lessons about nutrition.

The close of the week brought confirmation of the significance of our work. Consultant Beatrice Kiage-Mokua was one of 26 winners of the Excellent Abstract Award from Overseas for her work on community health volunteer knowledge and skills to counsel caregivers on infant and young child feeding during and after illness in Turkana County, Kenya. Research Advisor Laura Hackl was awarded the Young Investigator Excellent Abstract Award for her work comparing methods and HemoCue devices to determine hemoglobin in population surveys.?

USAID Advancing Nutrition is committed to discovering innovative methods and approaches to resolving the barriers to implementing effective nutrition programming and turning ideas into action to create a better future for all populations.??

Learn more about USAID Advancing Nutrition’s presentations at ICN.?