Districts with more soil zinc samples had significantly lower rates of underweight children and child stunting
A new study published in Nature journal on August 21, 2023, highlighted the strong relationship between soil micronutrients and nutritional outcomes of people, especially children and adult women.
Districts with more soil zinc samples had significantly lower rates of underweight children and child stunting.
Soil zinc availability is also associated with an increase in the height of women, it said. Soil iron availability is also strongly related to anaemia among women and haemoglobin levels among children and women.
In India, over 35 per cent of the soil was estimated to be deficient in zinc and about 11 per cent was estimated to be deficient in iron. India has roughly a third of the global population suffering from micronutrient deficiency(as per Global Nutrition report 2018).
While the rate of child stunting was about 39 per cent, malnutrition was one of the leading risk factors for loss of Disability-Adjusted Life-Years in 2017, according to the Lancet’s Global Burden of Disease Study 1990-2017.
Human zinc deficiency is generally found to inhibit linear growth and the results of the study thus suggest that crops harvested in such soil did not have the zinc necessary for growth.
The study utilised data from 2017-2019 of over 27 million soil tests publicly available at the district level, conducted in recent years by the central government’s Soil Health Card scheme. Data on children’s and women’s health, as well as data for study controls, were drawn from India’s 2015-16 National Family Health Survey (NFHS).
These findings are important from a public health perspective because India has one of the highest cases of anaemia with 53.1 per cent of women (age 15-49 years) and 58.5 per cent of children under the age of five being anaemic.
However, the effect of the association of low soil zinc availability with childhood stunting appeared to be strongest in wealthier households. This perhaps reflected the fact that children from poorer households face many more health constraints beyond zinc status that contribute to stunting.
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