After more than a decade studying the wide-ranging effects of poor nutrition on children, former Wall Street Journal reporter Roger Thurow is outraged. Now he wants to inspire action.

His “moment of great disruption” occurred in Ethiopia in 2003 during the first famine of the 21st century. Speaking at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on June 1, he recounted looking into the eyes of a five-year-old child named Hagirso who was dying of hunger. From that moment, Thurow was afflicted with what a colleague called, a “disease of soul.”

Thurow began traveling to Guatemala, India, Uganda, and Chicago to track children in their first 1,000 days of life, beginning around three months gestation and ending on the child’s second birthday. Stunting during this critical window can determine the course of a child’s life, affecting the brain’s ability to form neural connections that are vital for learning and the body’s ability to grow and develop properly.

Thurow describes stunting as a “life sentence of underachievement and under performance.” A child with diminished physical or mental capacity is not only a “lost possibility of greatness for one child, [but a] loss to all of us.”

His Pulitzer-supported project and subsequent book, The First 1,000 Days: A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children – and the World, explores this phenomenon around the world, revealing a startling injustice. The amount of food produced worldwide is ever increasing, yet one in four children under five years of age is stunted.

Parallel Lives

Although the women who participated in Thurow’s project lived on different continents, spoke different languages, and had unique cultures, when asked what they wanted for their children when they grow up, they answered in chorus: “A good education.”

Thurow’s project reveals the deep connection between nutrition and education. Of course, safe schools with well-trained teachers are a crucial facet, but children who are malnourished and mentally stunted have a diminished capacity for learning and even the most well-developed educational infrastructure will be of no help.

Educating children begins on day one of their first 1,000 days by feeding their bodies and minds with nutritious foods, he said. In order to ensure a child’s future, families and communities must first invest in preventing malnutrition and stunting.

Throughout Thurow’s time collecting stories and data for the project he witnessed numerous success stories where families and communities did just that.

Esther, a mother in Uganda, began to grow biofortified vitamin A orange sweet potatoes and high iron beans – provided by HarvestPlus, an initiative by the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – to feed to her son Rodgers. At two years old, he was healthy, happy, and robust.

After surviving the devastating loss of her first child, Brenda, another mother in Uganda, gave birth to a healthy, approximately eight-pound baby (there were no scales to confirm). However, on Thurow’s second visit to the family, a dysentery outbreak in the well behind their home had severely jeopardized the child’s health, highlighting the effect water and infrastructure can have on child health.    

Maria Estella, a mother in Guatemala, already had one stunted child, so when her second child was born she was eager to ensure better conditions. Through the knowledge she gained at a local nutritional rehabilitation course, Maria Estella prevented her son, Jorge, from stunting. At two years old, he was nearly the same size as his four-year-old sister and had far fewer health complications.

For more information on Thurow’s project, visit outrageandinspire.com.