Does dietary diversity improve the quality of infant formulas ?

In a country such as the DR Congo, where nearly half of all children suffer from malnutrition, the use of nutritional inputs from various local food sources is often presented as an economic strategy and an alternative to imported commercial products. Using linear programming, we attempted to analyze the impact of the diversity of local ingredients on the cost and quality of therapeutic food for children. We compiled a ranked list of 12 ingredients that more than 6,000 mothers and caregivers of malnourished children in eastern and central Democratic Republic of Congo would like to see included in infant formula. By formalizing and solving a formulation program using a solver, we successively generated eleven optimized formulations from these twelve ingredients, adding them one by one in order of preference. A thirteenth formulation incorporating a densified resource of essential trace elements was generated. We then analyzed the price evolution of our formulations and their threshold of satisfaction of the 47 nutritional reference constraints for this type of food. The more diverse a mixture is, the more nutritional constraints, but this improvement is almost always accompanied by a significant increase in cost. The mixture of 12 local ingredients only satisfies 48.93 % of 47 nutritional requirements set by the FAO/WHO illustrating the difficulty of formulating an optimal food at low cost based solely on these resources. Most of the unsatisfactory constraints were about micronutrients. The addition of a micronutrient-dense resource raises this rate to 100 % but approximately doubled the cost of the mixture. Local food diversity is not the only required resources for the formulation of a large satisfied therapeutic infant food adapted to the local context. Resources rich in essential trace elements are needed. These resources deserve special attention from nutrition program managers, as the cost of infant formulas depends on them.