When in 2016 malnutrition was worsening among the Venezuelan population, nutritionist Oscar Vasquez began his master’s degree in Food and Nutrition Planning. At that time, he was attending up to 20 children a day in a clinic in Los Valles del Tuy, on the outskirts of Caracas, in the central north of the country.
“There was not one who left his office without being diagnosed with moderate or severe malnutrition,” writes journalist Alexandra Sucre, who reported the story of Vásquez for La Vida de Nos, which we feature here.
Vásquez’s postgraduate studies were going to end up meaning an improvement for her patients.
In February 2019, the nutritionist did the final test of his master’s thesis, a caloric and nutritious food prepared with peanuts and chocolate, as well as vitamin and mineral mixtures, packed in 100 grams sachets. He applied it to 10 children, his patients, who in their daily diet had only arepas made with raw corn, without filling or with margarine, black beans or lentils and a cup of rice, the journalist reports.
Sucre describes that in the bodies of the children she saw in Vasquez’s office – and their young mothers – “the bones are easy to see.”
The food Vasquez gave to these 10 children from zero to three years old brought them to the sizes that corresponded to their ages. According to UNICEF criteria, those with moderate malnutrition took two sachets of the food daily; those with severe malnutrition took three. In less than a month, they gained an average of two and a half kilos. They went “from moderate malnutrition to normal weight,” the reporter writes. The food Vásquez created “is designed to prevent loss of intellectual capacity due to lack of nutrients.”
“Oscar saw them more lively and alert. He noticed their eyes were glowing,” Alexandra Sucre wrote.
Vásquez began developing this product in early 2018 as a result of his research for her master’s thesis in Food and Nutrition Planning, the La Vida de Nos journalist reported. As Sucre relates, the nutritionist followed the guidelines of the Codex Alimentarius of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). According to this guide, food supplements should have the ideal mixture of minerals and vitamins that provides sufficient nutrients: it is called “premix.”
Vasquez chose sesame, cashew, peanuts and cocoa to begin testing. With these ingredients he made five different foods, all combined with the premix, and powdered milk and oil: one of cashew, one of cashew with chocolate, one of peanut, one of peanut with chocolate and one of sesame. He created them in the laboratories of the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas.
To finance these ingredients and the laboratory tests in a market with hyperinflation like Venezuela’s, Vásquez had help. Alexandra Sucre reported that an acquaintance of his colleagues or his tutor financed the entire process, from the ingredients and tests to the final product. This person wants to remain anonymous. With hyperinflation, prices change with the hours, they don’t last more than a day. The labs, according to the reporter, were collaborating with Vasquez by keeping the prices for a while longer or making a very small increase.
Vasquez, Sucre continues, tested the products on 100 children. She also gave them a “ready-to-eat therapeutic food” that is protein-based and follows international standards for treating malnutrition. The Venezuelan government’s National Institute of Nutrition uses it, the journalist reports. By giving the children both products, Vásquez “wanted to evaluate the acceptance of his food with respect to the international formula,” Sucre writes.
Eighty-nine percent of the children approved the peanut and chocolate formula. They even preferred it to the international one.
So Vásquez created a creamy paste as a final product, so that the children, so small, anemic and weak from malnutrition, could digest it easily.
In fact, during field research, Oscar Vasquez and his fellow doctor Francisco Peñalver went from door to door to the homes of families who would be possible recipients of his treatment. They found children with fever, vomiting, diarrhea, infections caused by malnutrition. Journalist Alexandra Sucre wrote that Vasquez and Peñalver referred them to hospitals so that they could recover and then receive treatment.
The ten children to whom Vasquez gave the peanut and chocolate food had no previous illnesses and were not allergic to those ingredients.
In February 2020, Oscar Vasquez passed his master’s thesis with honors and publication mention. Precisely that month, the 2020 Global Nutrition Report showed that in Venezuela “the national prevalence of stunted growth in children under five is 13.4%, which is below the developing countries average of 25%. The prevalence of slimming in children under-five in Venezuela is 4.1%, which is also lower than the developing countries average of 8.9%,” as reported by El Correo del Caroní.
The evolution of the 10 children who received Vasquez’s treatment is indisputable. “These results are more encouraging than Oscar himself believes: the product can be used in food and nutrition emergencies where acute malnutrition is more prevalent,” writes La Vida de Nos’ journalist.
Oscar Vásquez would like the food he created to be produced and distributed massively in Venezuela, according to the piece. He also confirmed this to IQ Latino. For now, the pandemic crisis is holding up the progress of his project. “We have not yet been able to do anything more because of the COVID issue, just some recommendations to groups of people,” Vasquez wrote in a private Twitter message. Those recommendations, he adds, are on how to combine food groups for patients who come to his office.