Animal Source Foods - Adequate Food for All - page 191

high-quality protein, may facilitate specific mechanisms, such as speed of informa-
tion processing, that are involved in learning tasks such as problem-solving capacity.
Children receiving the snack with milk performed the poorest in the test of problem-
solving ability. A possible explanation is that milk, with its high casein and calcium
contents, impedes iron absorption—iron is intimately involved with cognitive func-
tion (Neumann et al. 2007).
For school performance, as measured by end-of-term test scores, the children
who received the snack with meat had the greatest percentage increase in zonal end-
term total test scores. The greatest percentage increase in arithmetic subtest scores
was also seen in these children (Neumann et al. 2007).
P h y s i C a L a C t i v i t y , e m o t i o n a L s t a t e , a n D s o C i a L
i n t e r a C t i o n s D u r i n g f r e e P L a y
The Human Nutrition Collaborative Support Program, a longitudinal observational
study in Egypt, Kenya, and Mexico, found that children who were better nourished
(in terms of both energy and animal source foods) were more active and happy
and showed more leadership behavior during free play, whereas poorly nourished
children appeared more anxious on the school playground (Espinosa et al. 1992).
Mexican boys who consumed poor-quality diets were apathetic in the classroom
(Allen et al. 1992a). Contrary to cognitive abilities, which were more highly associ-
ated with the level of intake of animal source food than with overall energy intake, a
diet providing sufficient energy seemed more important than diet quality for activity
level, positive emotion, and leadership on the playground (Sigman et al. 2005).
The results of a food supplementation study in Kenyan children show that both
diet quantity and quality are important for children's activities on the school play-
ground. Children who received any type of snack during school break (with or with-
out animal source foods) were more active and showed more leadership behavior and
social initiation behaviors during playing than did children who did not receive extra
food. However, children who received a snack containing meat showed the great-
est increase in percentage time in high levels of physical activity and in initiative
and leadership behaviors compared with children who received a vegetarian snack
with equal levels of energy but less protein, iron, and zinc. Children who received a
snack with milk performed the most poorly of the three intervention groups, prob-
ably because it provided less of the important nutrients for child behavior than did
the meat supplement (Sigman et al. 2005).
meAt consumPtIon And dIetARy IRon bIoAvAIlAbIlIty
Iron deficiency anemia is highly prevalent in developing countries (ACC Sub-
Committee on Nutrition 2000) and can be partly attributed to the low iron bioavail-
ability in the customary cereal and legume-based diet. Bioavailability is defined
as the amount of a nutrient that is potentially available for absorption from a meal
and, once absorbed, utilizable for metabolic processes and storage in the body. Iron
status, the content of heme and nonheme iron, and the bioavailability of the two