The Role of Agricultural Biodiversity in The Diet: a Vietnamese Study

Bioversity International

Status: Completed

Conditions: Biodiversity; Food Intake

Treatments: Behavioral: Promotion of a biodiverse diet

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02626988

BIOHTDIET2015JR

Details and patient eligibility

About

What is the role of Agricultural biodiversity in improving diet diversity, quality and nutrition?

Full description

Agricultural biodiversity can have an important role in improving diet diversity, quality and nutrition and can be seen as the foundation of the food and nutrition value chain.

Increasing the availability and access to local agricultural and/or wild biodiversity genetic resources has the potential to increase production, making more food available for consumption as long as entitlements to access it exist. However, as the history of food security interventions has shown, increasing the production and supply of staple crops alone is not enough to improve food security or nutritional status. However, while agricultural diversification is an important component, it is not alone sufficient to improve diet diversity. Other system elements including women's education and knowledge, intra-household dynamics and women's status and cultural beliefs and practices that improves children's health and nutrition are important to ensure biodiversity has a successful role in improving dietary diversity and quality.

Enrollment: 180 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 12 months to 55 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Woman of reproductive age (between 15-49 years) who are the mother or primary caregiver of a child between 12 and 23 months of age.
• Both the woman and the child should be permanent residents in the village selected and do not temporarily migrate outside the village cluster during the year.
• Reside in a Thai Village

Exclusion criteria

• Reside in a village that is the Urban center of commune/province
• Currently engaged in other agriculture or nutrition programme or Intervention apart from what is offered by government extension workers

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

---

180 participants in 2 patient groups

Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

The intervention group will receive capacity building sessions on the 'Promotion of a biodiverse diet' and will include both Agriculture and Nutrition topics, in addition to access to routine health and nutrition checks, and agriculture extension as offered by commune and provincial staff as normal. 5 Sessions will be held in each village over 12 months.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Promotion of a biodiverse diet

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

The control group will continue to receive routine health check and nutrition education from health staff at commune health facilities. Access to agriculture extension services as offered by provincial staff will also continue as normal.