Animal protein on stunting prevention: A narrative review

Abstract

Stunting has been a global problem even though adult and child obesity has not been resolved yet. Various approaches have been carried out in the nutrition field and others. The Government of Indonesia recently established an effort on stunting reduction acceleration through its Ministry of Health. The accessibility to healthy food, including sources of animal protein, become one of its strategies. This study aims to explore the efforts evolved in stunting reduction, especially regarding access, availability, and provision of animal-based products to supply the source of animal protein. The review was done narratively from scientific sources such as Pubmed and Scopus. The 193 articles were derived from the search applying keywords “protein”, “policy”, “malnutrition”, and “stunting”, and their combination using the Boolean operator. There are 193 studies screened resulting in 159 studies excluded from 3 stages, and 40 studies in the review. The articles were then reviewed systematically using Covidence, a web-based systematic literature review tool. The study results show that the availability of animal products is much better, but not yet supported by good distribution and an increase in accessibility. The government has supported this with sufficient policy, however, more thorough action is still needed. Thus, sustainable animal farming is needed as one of the strategies to provide a sufficient quantity of animal products of optimal quality to prevent malnutrition, especially stunting.