The late Dr Basil Kransdorff a South African doctor developed a nutrient loaded porridge, developed specifically to cater to feeding HIV patients and babies.
When the late Dr Basil Kransdorff and wife Rose were helping an NGO called CARE (Community AIDS Response) at the Joburg General Hospital, little did they know that this would start a worldwide debate on Food Security vs Nutrition Security.
In 2000, a time when there was no medication, Doctors were telling patients diagnosed with HIV to go home, eat a healthy well-balanced diet and prepare to die. It was a difficult time when little was known about treating those living with HIV offers Dr Kransdorff.
An industrial chemist by trade, a social entrepreneur at heart, Dr Kransdorff was ‘commissioned’ by his wife to advise CARE what to put into food parcels funded by the Elton John Foundation.
Dr Kransdorff added:
“Using the advice from the Doctors, it became our mission to create an affordable single food portion that delivered many important nutrients found in a healthy well balanced diet. We well understood it is impossible for poor malnourished people to afford to eat a “well balanced diet”.
“We recognized people were dying from opportunistic diseases like TB or pneumonia because of low nutritional status. This was a key learning as it highlighted the importance of a nutritional intervention.
As a social entrepreneur with access to some of the brightest minds in the world helped to better understood the key technical challenges, Dr Kransdorff was able to develop an affordable food loaded with micro-nutrients branded as e’Pap.
The e’Pap journey led them away from the limited concept of ‘food security’ through ‘stomach-filling’ to a new focus called ‘nutrition security’. He defines nutrition security as the basis of sustainable development – the nutrition economy that results from communities made up of “nutrient replete” physiological function human beings that are better able to find their own solutions to poverty and health challenges. The nutrition crisis is not new. It has grown exponentially over the past 100 years as the food chain became compromised due to modern agriculture and food processing practices.
“Part solutions in current interventions use billions of dollars to address the problem fail to create sustainable change. A nutrient replete person is our goal.” says Dr Kransdorff.
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Current commercial farming practices produce an excess of macro stomach filling nutrients but leaves the body dysfunctional because of “hidden hunger” (micro nutrient deficiencies). If the body’s daily requirements of micro nutrients are not met it results in an accumulative deficit that result in the body becoming more malnourished daily. Part solutions that don’t address the daily deficit and leave people malnourished and dysfunctional.
Nutrient content in fruit and vegetables has dropped up to 76% over the past 50 years in the USA and Europe. Proof that modern intensive agriculture practices create the problem. The result is a global crisis of mass starvation of micronutrients in communities both rich and poor.
Such is the success of e’Pap in improving nutrition, energy and productivity for those who consume it, that up to two million servings a month of e’Pap are distributed in Africa.
Here’s to a nutrient-replete generation! And one of our favorite Game-Changers!
Show your support by donating e’Pap to your local children’s home, school, crèche or community center.
Contact the manufacturer on info@epap.co.za or Oma/ Rose on (011) 7265634
Visit the website for more information or distributor near you.
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