Giving Compass' Take:

• A study indicates that early childhood nutrition - often correlated with poverty - has a lasting impact on physical and mental health.

• How can philanthropy effectively improve early childhood nutrition? What other factors limit poor children?

• Find out the state of nutrition globally.

In the late 1960s, a team of researchers began doling out a nutritional supplement to families with young children in rural Guatemala. They were testing the assumption that providing enough protein in the first few years of life would reduce the incidence of stunted growth.

It did. Children who got supplements grew 1 to 2 centimeters taller than those in a control group. But the benefits didn't stop there. The children who received added nutrition went on to score higher on reading and knowledge tests as adolescents, and when researchers returned in the early 2000s, women who had received the supplements in the first three years of life completed more years of schooling and men had higher incomes.

A picture slowly emerged that being too short early in life is a sign of adverse conditions — such as poor diet and regular bouts of diarrhoeal disease — and a predictor for intellectual deficits and mortality. But not all stunted growth, which affects an estimated 160 million children worldwide, is connected with these bad outcomes. Now, researchers are trying to untangle the links between growth and neurological development. Is bad nutrition alone the culprit? What about emotional neglect, infectious disease or other challenges?

One of the challenges of such studies is that researchers are still trying to work out what normal brain development looks like. Similar to the Dhaka study, the researchers are looking at how brain development is related to a range of measures, including nutrition and parent–child interaction. But along the way, they are trying to define a standard trajectory of brain function for children.

Ultimately, it's not about whether children have stunted growth or even what their brains look like. It's about what their lives are like as they grow older.

Read the full article about poverty and the brain by Carina Storrs at Nature.