How we can help hungry kids, one text at a time | Su Kahumbu

Su Kahumbu raises badass cows — healthy, well-fed animals whose protein is key to solving a growing crisis in Africa: childhood nutritional stunting. With iCow, a simple SMS service she developed to support small-scale livestock farmers, the TED Fellow is helping farmers across the continent by texting them tips on caring for and raising animals. Learn more about how this cheap innovation is helping feed hungry kids, one text at a time.

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49 Comments on How we can help hungry kids, one text at a time | Su Kahumbu

  1. Our government should stop spending billions on military equipments and build factories for people to work.

  2. Seriously, check your studies before you go performing on stage. Took me 5 minutes of research to contradict half your arguments.

  3. Plant has more healthy protein than animal product. And higher ratio. If you feed the children in hunger with the grains that the livestock eat, we can save all the people in hunger. Animals are not food.

  4. I wonder if we could help provide nutrition to the youth just as well through plant based proteins – Pea protein, nuts, beans/lentils, soy protein, rice, buckwheat, there are a number of plants that contain protein. Lappé states that in almost all diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are getting enough protein (see paragraph at the bottom of this comment).

    However, cattle are an import part of many cultures, both as livelihoods as well as in cuisine. It is important to empower small-holder cattle owners! They can then have sufficient income by increasing productivity and live healthier with fewer diseases for their own safety and with others.

    Complete Protein/Amino Acid Food Thoughts:
    Frances Moore Lappé, who popularized the complete protein idea in 1971, retracted her statement of complete proteins. She said ” “With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.” in Lappé, Frances Moore (1981) Diet for a Small Planet, ISBN 0-345-32120-0.

  5. 65% of humans are lactose intolerant, this ratio is higher for African. Telling black people to eat something that will make them sick? Really?
    Don’t bring further cruelty to Africa.

    • Joannot Fampionona
      The lactose tolerance geen is supposed turn off in early childhood, after the relevant nutritional period.

  6. This lady has got to be enlightened on the concept of a whole food plant based diet. No one should be eating flesh. Going vegan gives you all the protein you will ever need, in a better form for your body, and doesn’t come with all the downsides of animal products like cholesterol, nitrosamines, heme-iron, as well as the pathogens. Your not solving problems, you just trading problems; dietary deficiencies with auto immune diseases. And, at the same time ruining the earth and needlessly force breeding, torturing, and killing animals. Eat plants from the earth for 1/10 the cost!

  7. How much food does it take to fatten up livestock? How much water does t take to keep livestock alive? Where is your evidence that a human can’t be healthy on a plant based diet? How about instead of feeding all of our crops to livestock, we feed them to starving people. There is enough food on this planet to feed 10 billion humans, yet we feed most of it to cows chickens and pigs.

    • Lugh Summerson way to dodge my point. The facts are that a well balanced diet does not require animal products and are in fact healthier than meat based diets. Also, there’s a food and water supply problem with animal agriculture, so be best and most sustainable way to feed humanity is a plant based diet.

    • The studies have been done hundreds of times, you can only defend your position with anti-vegan mythology for so long until all of your arguments fall under the weight of basic scrutiny.

    • There are quite a few studies showing veganism is the not the healthiest nor cheap. To many supplenments in order to get all the minerals and vitamins you need. Lmao. But hey keep doing you.

    • ReformedThe there are even more studies (credible studies) proving that a well balanced vegan diet is the ideal diet for human health. Every nutrient needed for ideal human health is available in abundance on a vegan diet, according to the World Health Organization. Also, veganism is far cheaper than the average meat based diet, plants are some of the cheapest things you can buy. And they’re even cheaper and more sustainable to grow. These are facts, accept that you are wrong and give up already, you are fighting against the basic scientific consensus and you provide no evidence. It’s pretty obvious who is correct here and I think everyone can tell.

  8. “Livestock production is not as easy as we think”, you’re making our arguments for us. Stop producing livestock and feed the grain directly to hungry people.

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