Food for thought: raising the world's IQ

This episode explores the profound impact of early childhood nutrition on cognitive development and intelligence, focusing on malnutrition and its consequences globally.

1. Critical Window: The first thousand days after conception are crucial for brain development, with nutrition during this period having lasting effects on intelligence.
2. Global Impact: Malnutrition affects over a fifth of children under five globally, significantly impacting cognitive development and economic potential.
3. Economic Costs: Undernutrition can cost the world around 6% of global GDP, with higher impacts in developing countries.
4. Effective Interventions: Simple interventions like educational programs and small financial supports can dramatically improve nutrition and cognitive outcomes.
5. Long-term Benefits: Addressing malnutrition could enhance global cognitive potential, improving economic outcomes and individual life quality.

1: Introduction to the Issue

This chapter sets the stage by introducing the profound impact of malnutrition on cognitive development. Jason Palmer: "Just as human muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, the brain needs food and stimulation to develop properly."

2: The Science of Nutrition

Detailed exploration of how nutritional deficiencies affect brain development, with a focus on micronutrient deficiencies. Robert Guest: "If you haven't got enough food or the right food during that period, it can grow up stunted both in the body and in its brain."

3: Global Nutritional Challenges

Discussion on the global scope of malnutrition and its implications for future generations, especially in poorer regions. Robert Guest: "Roughly half the world's young children and two thirds of the women of reproductive age have some form of micronutrient deficiency."

4: Solutions and Innovations

Examines successful interventions and potential solutions to combat malnutrition, including the Nutracash program. Jason Palmer: "There's a World Food program pilot project in Uganda known as Nutracash, where they just give $20 a month for about two years to mothers."

1. Educate Yourself: Understand the critical nutrients needed during early childhood and pregnancy.
2. Support Nutrition Programs: Engage with and support programs aimed at improving nutrition in your community.
3. Advocate for Policy Change: Push for policies that prioritize nutrition and health, especially for young children and pregnant women.
4. Implement Simple Interventions: Small changes in diet can lead to significant improvements in nutrition.
5. Promote Global Awareness: Raise awareness about the global impacts of malnutrition and the simple measures that can mitigate it.

If you don’t have enough food in the first 1,000 days of your life, your brain may never reach its full potential. Our correspondent discusses what better nutrition would mean for the world. Undersea cables are the arteries of our telecommunications system, but that also makes them vulnerable (9:13). And a new powder may help make periods less of a bloody nuisance (17:42).

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• Robert Guest
• Jason Palmer

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Jason Palmer
The Economist hello, and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist, I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event, shaping your world subsea cables may sound mundane, but these, these are the arteries of our international telecommunications systems. Unfortunately, that means they're also vulnerable to all sorts of murky activity.

Rosie Bloor
And there's a new remedy that might help dissipate one source of anxiety for half the world's population. Nope, not antidepressants or anything like that. It's a powder that could stop your period being quite such a bloody nuisance.

Jason Palmer
First up, though.

Robert Guest
Gebetah Naima was a month pregnant when men with guns burned her home and stole everything she had.

Terrified, she fled from her village in eastern Congo and with a dozen relatives, she walked for a week, hoping to reach Uganda, the much more peaceful country next door. Robert Guest is a deputy editor at the Economist.

She told me we had nothing, no food at all, only stream water and wild fruit. When she crossed the border. She said she was weak and hungry as she was fleeing, she was pregnant.

She told me that that famished journey and the months of deprivation that followed it may have affected her unborn daughter. She notes how the girl, Amina, who's eleven years old now, is noticeably slower than her younger brother, Mubaraka, who was better nourished both in the womb and in infancy.

Is he curious? Is he interested? Does he want to know what she's doing?

She said he always wants to know things. He sees older kids climbing trees and he wants to join in. He started to talk a year earlier than his older sister and to walk nearly two years earlier.

Jason Palmer
And I suppose it stands to reason, then, that misses Kavita's older daughter and younger son have that difference because of the malnutrition that happened early on in the daughter's life. Well, that seems likely. I mean, just as human muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, the brain needs food and stimulation to develop properly. The most crucial period is the golden window. That's the first thousand days after conception.

Robert Guest
If you haven't got enough food or the right food during that period, it can grow up stunted both in the body and in its brain. The speed at which a baby grows immediately after birth is a significant predictor of its iq when it's at school 910 years later. So all of that qualitatively makes sense. But I know that you've been looking into what's known quantitatively about those effects. Well, the good news is that the share of children under five who are stunted has fallen from about a third in the year 2000 to slightly more than a fifth last year.

That's about 150 million children. But the overall pace of improvement in nutrition has slowed in the past decade, and we still have a huge problem with micronutrient deficiency. So roughly half the world's young children and two thirds of the women of reproductive age have some form of micronutrient deficiency. And because fertility is higher in poorer countries, future births will largely be in the parts of the world where nutrition is currently the worst. And so what are the onward effects of that for the world in these countries where this is such a problem?

So it's pretty universally accepted among scientists that if you don't feed a brain properly, it doesn't grow properly. How big is that effect? Well, UNICEF gathers data on how toddlers develop. So measures like, can they say more than ten words, jump with both feet, count to ten, that kind of thing. And we've looked at their numbers, and we find that the stunting rates of those children explain half the variation of how many kids are on track developmentally.

Now, that's a much bigger effect than, say, poverty, which explains less than 10% of it. So what we're saying is that malnutrition is a much bigger obstacle to brain development than just poverty on its own. This is hugely important. I mean, the size of the effect of a combination of malnutrition and a lack of stimulation on a brain can be, like, 15 iq points. That's the difference between whether you can cope okay with the modern world and whether you really find it very hard.

So that affects the quality of people's lives, it affects how much they earn as adults. It affects pretty much their whole life course, and that affects national economies, too. There's one estimate that undernutrition costs the whole world about 6% of GDP, and it's roughly double that in developing countries. So these are absolutely huge numbers and. An absolutely huge problem.

Jason Palmer
But how to go about fixing it? Well, to fix it, you have to understand where it's coming from. And here's a really interesting finding from UNiceF. Roughly half the kids in the world on severely restricted diets come from poor families. Now, that's kind of what you'd expect, but half of them don't.

Robert Guest
And the reason for that, we think, is essentially that a lot of parents don't know how to feed their kids properly. They don't know much about nutrition. They think it's enough to fill a child with a stodgy staple like sort of porridge or rice. But they forget about things like protein and vegetables and micronutrients. Another big problem is sickness.

If the water's dirty and the baby has a bacterial infection or diarrhea or something, it can be hard for it to absorb the nutrients from the food. In one slum in South Asia, a study found that 90% of the poor women there had inflamed intestines, suggesting they haven't got the right gut bacteria to digest properly what they eat. So what can we do about all this? Obviously, it would help if we had fewer wars and more economic growth, but those things are very difficult to achieve. More specifically and narrowly, you can make programs that give pregnant mothers a little bit of cash and a little bit of education, and that can make a big difference pretty quickly.

Jason Palmer
And there are examples of that working. There's a World Food program pilot project in Uganda known as Nutracash, where they just give $20 a month for about two years to mothers like Miss Kbita, provided they listen to useful advice on how to grow vegetables in their backyards, how to feed their babies a more balanced diet, and how to stimulate them when they're very small. I spoke with a number of mothers who seemed really to have absorbed the message. They told me how they were very careful about washing their hands and utensils before preparing food. They all reported giving a much more varied diet to themselves and to their children.

Robert Guest
Miss Kebeta, for example, said that she weaned her first child, remember, the one who had the developmental difficulties? She weaned her on just boiled water with sugar dissolved in it.

She told me she didnt know anything about nutrition back then, but now that shes in the program, she does.

Jason Palmer
So it seems as if the interventions narrowly can be quite straightforward. What sort of gains would that give the world then to directly address malnutrition in those ways? If we could dramatically reduce malnutrition, that would mean the whole next generation growing up, on average, more intelligent, more likely to fulfill their cognitive potential. That would be extraordinary. That means they would cope better with the modern world.

Robert Guest
It would mean that they would find it easier to find good jobs. It means they would find it easier to cope with everything that life throws at them in the modern world. What you suggest sounds simple enough, but how much would it cost? It would be surprisingly cheap. The World bank estimates it would cost about $12 billion a year to fight malnutrition on a large scale.

So for less than a 10th of what America spends on farm subsidies each year, we could give humanity a shot at reaching its cognitive potential. Robert, thanks very much for your time. Well, thank you, Jason. For a lot more on the science of nutrition and the coming innovations that aim to make malnutrition history, check out this week's episode of Babbage, our sister show on Science and Tech. It'll be out later today.

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Shashank Joshi
The words I'm speaking now, the podcast that is winding its way to your phone, everything we do on the Internet, it's probably made its way to you around the world through the very dark depths of the ocean in undersea cables. Shashank Joshi is the economist defense editor. Around the world, you'll find around 600 of these cables. These run the length of pretty much any big body of water you can think of, the Atlantic, the North Sea, the Pacific, the South China Sea. This is the bedrock of our global communication systems.

Rosie Bloor
Shashank, let me just pull back for a second. What do these cables actually look like? Can you give us a picture? These are fiber optic cables through which information is being sent via the magic of pulses of light. Nothing more sophisticated than that.

Shashank Joshi
It's wrapped in stranded steel wires, aluminium barriers, polycarbonate, copper, petroleum jelly, all these things, basically designed to keep everything from sharks to ship anchors from tearing it into pieces. And there are cable landing stations all over the world, and this is where the cables literally come ashore. Here is where the world's communication is being concentrated. Think of it like a data chokepoint. And so if you're a spy service, this is where the jackpot is.

Rosie Bloor
It does seem like these would be very vulnerable to anyone who wants to attack what's actually been happening? Well, the first thing to note is cables have been a military target for well over 100 years. I think the first serious cable cutting took place in the spanish american war of 1898, and Britain cut german cables ahead of the first and second world wars, the aim being not just to deny the other side military communications, but also to make them use radio waves, which you could then intercept in a way that you might not be able to for cables. That is still absolutely a valid military tactic that big countries are interested in. But the reason we're having this conversation now is because there's grave concern, particularly in Europe, over the security of the transatlantic and northern atlantic cables that we rely on, and the fear that Russia, which has been conducting a sabotage campaign on land across Europe, you know, setting warehouses ablaze, we've just learnt of an assassination plot against the head of a german army company that the russian navy, which has incredible experience in deep sea cable cutting technologies, might seek to do this as a way of disrupting western societies.

Shashank Joshi
And there have been a few murky incidents in the Baltic Sea in the past year or so. And when you say murky incidents, what do you mean? Well, take the example of the balticonnecting, which is an undersea gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea. And there's a nearby communication cable in October 2023 that was damaged in the Gulf of Finland. And officials suspected that a chinese owned container ship, it has a wonderful name, it's called the new new polar bear, was responsible for this because it turned up in a russian port with its anchor missing.

And very suspiciously, it had swapped its crew in Kaliningrad, which is a russian exclave in Europe. Now, here is a great example of why it is so difficult to understand what is going on underwater even now. We don't really know whether this was an accident or whether this was deliberate russian action. And the fact is that there are more than 100 cables damaged every year, but the majority of those are basically fishing vessels or ships that have dragged their anchor in a reckless way. Actual state action is probably very rare, but we don't know for sure.

And I think there is concern in NATO that russian vessels, including what purport to be civilian vessels, have been hanging around european critical infrastructure, whether that's cables, whether that's pipelines, in a slightly suspicious way, much more than usual in the past year or so. And can we expect to see this becoming a more common tactic in conflict then? Well, Rosie, I know you've written a lot about China and Taiwan and a possible invasion, and Pentagon officials and american military planners, they are concerned about the prospect that China could cut the cables to Taiwan. And I looked back at some war games that were run in 2021, and what they found is that chinese cable attacks resulted in the loss of Internet connectivity, not just on Taiwan, but also in Japan, Guam, Hawaii. These are, of course, crucial military bases for the Americans in Asia.

And they then had to rely on satellite communications, which were lower bandwidth and in some cases, perhaps easier to intercept. So you can see that cable cutting could be a really attractive target in any sino american war in the future. And just how easy is that sabotage to fix? It can be done. There are ships that can lift these cables up, that can splice them, repair them.

We've been doing it again for over 100 years. But the problem is there are only about 60 or so repair ships in the world, and it can take weeks or months for these things to be fixed. But right now, there are only four big companies in the world that do serious cable laying, and that's an american company, a japanese company, a french company, and a chinese company. And in a war, I don't think you want the chinese company to be the one who is pulling up your cables and repairing them. But there are chinese cable ships repairing american cables.

And I can tell you, for certain, american spooks are not very happy about this. I'll bet they're not. Tell me what the dangers are of chinese ships helping repair american cables. Well, first of all, I should say that it's not fair to hear, to pick on the Chinese, because if you look at the history of cable tapping, it was the Americans who were the masters of this. This was an incredible intelligence operation of the Cold War, but it was dwarfed in scale by what would later happen.

About a decade ago, of course, Edward Snowden, a man who worked for the National Security Agency, Americas signals intelligence agency, revealed that GCHQ, Britains signals intelligence service, along with America, had tapped more than 200 fiber optic cables, many of which, of course, came ashore in western Britain and was hoovering up Internet traffic, voice data, phone data. So that really is the concern. Is there anything that can be done about this? So, undersea domain awareness is a huge part of the problem, just figuring out who is trying to do naughty stuff underwater. And what we are now seeing with the war in Ukraine and concern over russian sabotage is that NATO countries are increasing air and naval patrols near critical infrastructure.

They are swapping data with each other more than they used to. They are talking to the private sector more than they used to, because ultimately, it's private firms that are running these cables. But I think the most interesting point is the geopolitical contest that you're now seeing with America saying, actually, this is too important to be left to the market. And they are trying to compete with chinese firms by funneling grants to companies. And it's not just America.

We can see the australian government saying, hang on a minute. We do not like the idea of a Huawei linked company, a chinese linked enterprise, building a cable connecting Sydney to South Pacific islands in ways that would give them all these intelligence opportunities, and they are building alternative cables. So I think the bottom line here, Rosie, is that infrastructure has become crucial to geopolitics. Whether that's 5g telecommunications, whether that's satellites cables, I think, are no exception. Shashank, thank you so much.

Rosie Bloor
I had no idea that cables were so interesting and so terrifying a subject. Thank you so much for having me.

Emily, tell me about your earliest memory of it. I guess, like, my, my core memory of it is the first time I saw it, which was when I was still a child, and it was one of the girls in my class and obviously perhaps wasn't quite used to it yet, but it instilled the fear in me. It is one of those anxieties that kind of unites us all, isn't it? I think you are right, Rosie, that, like, it's not so much that the sort of big leak happens all the time, it's more like you really worry about it happening. Exactly.

Exactly. And it's, you know, when it happens, you just deal with it. Like a lot of things in life. Exactly. And you're sort of like, I remember I had to wear a white dress for my graduation, and it's just, you just don't want it to happen.

Emily Steinmark
You don't want to have to think about it. It's a wild mental calculation all the time. Exactly. And we're not talking about oil leaks, are we here, Emily? No, we're not.

We're not. We're talking about periods. We are talking about periods.

Rosie Bloor
Emily Steinmark, you write about science for the Economist, and I'm very delighted that you do because you're here to tell us that there's going to be some brilliant solution to our problems. I mean, certainly there is what one expert described to me as a breath of fresh air in the area of research into menstrual products, which, you know, I hope is sort of a better description of the feeling that one will have after using this, rather than just the horrible dampness that many people will be used to. It's essentially an idea that looks at rather than how can we amp up the protection for periods and capturing the blood? How can we change the blood itself to prevent leaks and spills that are the side product of menstruation that perhaps is one of the most annoying and anxiety inducing. This sounds like alchemy to me.

How can we turn blood into something else? Well, so you can use what's called a polymer. These are long chains of molecules. And when this particular one alginate that they used mixes with blood, the positive calcium ions in the blood will go in and attract these long chains of the polymers that are negatively charged. And that tangled web captures and traps the blood and creates a really firm gelatinous.

Emily Steinmark
So where it was a liquid that could flow and spill, you now have something that's much firmer and much more easy to deal with. And is it comfortable to wear firm gel? Well, it's a good question. I mean, so they tried two different things. They tried, first, an improvement of the pad, right?

So by taking this powder in between the cotton to create a sort of makeshift pad, and they taped it to a model of a vagina made of silicone, poured some blood through it, and then saw how it spread. They put it in a centrifuge to mimic compression of a person sitting down on it. And it contains the blood much more than what we actually have now with commercial fillers in pads. So it absorbs about the same amount. But when it compresses, it retains much more of that blood.

So, you know, in theory, it should be comfortable. It shouldn't feel like you're sat on something spongy, like it will just be a thin layer. It should just be a drier experience. And then I think the other thing that they looked at, which is interesting, is that they used it in a menstrual cup. So, for people that perhaps don't know, a menstrual cup is just a little cup made of silicone that you insert into the vagina.

And then it sort of sits there and collects the blood. But what they did was that they took a tube of cotton to create a liner. They put the alginate powder into it. And then once it was inserted, it created this blood gel. So that when you had to take it out, which is usually an incredibly messy affair because you have to it, like, it creates a seal with the vaginal walls.

You have to pinch it to break the seal. And once you pinch a cup full of blood, the blood really goes everywhere. I mean, especially if you're in a public toilet. Like, it's not pretty. And it's very annoying to have to deal with.

The blood just stays in there. When it's the gel, you just take it out and the blood just sits at the bottom and you can just turn it around and, like, wiggle the thing and it pops back into the toilet and you don't have to deal with it, really. So I think there are definitely ways in which this could be as comfortable, if not way more comfortable, certainly way less annoying than what women have to deal with at the moment. It's a fascinating one, though. I was looking, as you do, at the history of sanitary products and found that the applicator tampon was invented in 1931, apparently, and it was very important that it had an applicator because, of course, women couldn't possibly touch themselves.

Rosie Bloor
But it looks like, you know, we could be on course for a century on to have a new, new introduction to menstrual products that could actually really help us. So thank you. Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcasteconomist.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow.

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