Welcome to a website providing access to Ted Greiner’s papers

This website is the brainchild of my wife, Denise Arcoverde. She created the first version in Geocities already in 1997. On the upper right side is a panel of categories or topics which the various papers deal with. There can be many categories marked for each paper.

Below that on the right is a list of dates. Only one date is marked for each paper.

A few papers are written directly into the site. A few others are Word documents. Most are pdf documents. Many of these are scanned, especially for older papers which were typed on paper, not written on computers.

Each paper is preceded by a graphic which has something to do with the topic. Many are art work, handicraft items, or statues, usually with a breastfeeding theme, that I bought over the past 35 years when working or touristing in various countries.

Vitamins and minerals for women: recent programs and intervention trials

This invited review article covers a lot of territory, but its main focus is on the large recent literature on the impact of multimicronutrient supplementation to women during pregnancy in low-income settings. At this time the overall picture presented by the data does not appear to justify recommending it over existing standards of care, which usually include iron and folic acid.

View the pdf file here.

The Breastfeeding Mother’s Nutrition

This article was written for the lay public and came out in the first issue of the new La Leche League magazine Breastfeeding Today.

Click here to open the article online.

Iron-Fortified Rice Is As Efficacious As Supplemental Iron Drops in Infants and Young Children

This paper won the Kellogg’s Award in 2009 at the Latin American Nutrition Congress in Chile as the best nutrition research emerging from Latin America since the previous meeting in 2006. Conventional thinking says that ordinary food fortification cannot prevent, let alone treat iron deficiency in infants and young children. However, Ultra Rice (conventionally fortified, NOT genetically modified rice) did so in this study in Brazil, actually outperforming the recent Government of Brazil standard of care, which is iron drops. This was because these children in Minas Gerais eat so much rice on a daily basis, about 100g per day of cooked rice. No effort was made to encourage them to eat rice nor to remind parents in the control group to give iron drops (beyond the initial instructions). Click here to access the full text pdf file.

Kenya Infant Feeding Assessment

This reports on two studies done with funding I applied for from USAID Kenya. The purpose was to examine the infant feeding patterns of infants exposed to HIV and to observe the infant feeding counseling the mothers received, as well as doing interviews with a sample of mothers. Click here to open the pdf file.

Tanzania national survey on iodine deficiency: impact after twelve years of salt iodation

This paper reports on the first national survey on iodine deficiency in Tanzania, conducted on over 140,000 school children, including a measure of iodine content of household salt, goiter prevalence and urinary iodine measures on a subsample of 4523. Click here to access the pdf file.

Beyond Melamine: More Reasons Not to Use Animal Milk in Infant Feeding

This paper in the Journal of Human Lactation reviews the melamine disaster in China and points out that the basic cause (trying to mask with this fake protein that the milk sold to formula manufacturers was diluted with water), also means that one never knows how dilute animal milk is in any less regulated markets, provides another argument against feeding it to infants. (Diluted milk cannot be detected easily and is probably common. But, without melamine added, it will be an economic but not a nutritional or health problem for children over one year for whom it is not such a big part of the diet.)

Click here to open the pdf file.

Improved salt iodation methods for small-scale salt producers in low-resource settings in Tanzania

This study was part of the research Vincent Assey did for his PhD at Bergen University (begun at Uppsala). It developed, in the field, methods for standardizing salt iodation among small producers using spray bottles and backpack sprayers. These simple technologies are the way forward, not the use of cement mixers and other intermediate scale equipment which cannot be maintained by producers surviviing on such small profit margins in such isolated areas. Click here to open the pdf file.

Relationship of parental characteristics and feeding practices to overweight in infants and young children in Beijing, China

This is another in the remarkable series of studies Dr. Jiang Jingxiong has done on obesity in children in Beijing. It’s the one that has most closely looked at infant feeding and confirms that exclusive breastfeeding, delaying introduction of solid foods beyond 4 months and delaying introduction of infant formula beyond 4 months are each independently associated with lower risk for obesity among childen < 3 years old. Click here to open the full-text pdf file.