The calorie requirements of Nigerian peasant farmers.

A report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (F.A.O.: Second Committee on Calorie Requirements, 1957) attempts to express the energy needs of healthy and active human beings in quantitative terms. ‘The recommendations are designed for application to countries or fairly large groups of people and not to individuals.’ They are based on a reference man of 65 kg body-weight at 25 years of age, living in the temperate zone at a mean annual external temperature of IO’, and on a reference woman of 55 kg body-weight living in the same environment. The man is assumed to require a daily average of 3200 kcal, and the woman 2300 kcal. By allowing for variations in body-weight, age from birth through childhood and adolescence to old age, for differences in external temperature, and for pregnancy and lactation, methods to assess the calorie requirement of any community are set out. The report draws attention to the fact that diets throughout the world differ in digestibility and nutrient composition, and emphasizes that suitable allowances must be made for such variations. In spite of the Committee’s warning that its recommendations are designed for application to fairly large groups of people, an attempt is made in this paper to correlate the calorie value of the diets of certain small rural Nigerian populations with the physiological requirements suggested by the F.A.O. Committee. Another paper considers the question of protein requirements (Nicol, 1959 a). The term ‘physiological’ raises difficulties, as all the communities investigated were infested more or less with intestinal and other parasites, and the Committee’s recommendations do not allow for such loads. The incidence of infestation has been indicated, but the people have been considered together with their parasites in comparing the calorie value of their diets with the F.A.O. requirements. In spite of the primitive conditions in which they live it is estimated that the rural communities of Nigeria are increasing in numbers at a rate of approximately 2% a year (Nicol, 1959b). The food-consumption studies here reported were undertaken between 1954 and 1957 in an attempt to determine the general adequacy or otherwise of the Nigerian peasants’ diets. They were combined with detailed clinical examinations to establish base-lines from which to judge the future development of the farmers’ health, upon which depends the health of the urban populations, and also to provide data that might be of value to the various Nigerian Governments in formulating agricultural policies. The small sample communities studied were carefully selected to be typical of people living in the different vegetation zones of Nigeria. Each collection of compounds, hamlet or village was situated at least 50 miles from a town of 5000 or more