FIDR staff (right back), cooks at NPH (left), and a doctor of DN (center) are discussing to identify problem areas in meal menus and cooking methods.

The development of first Cambodian Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) we, FIDR, have worked on 2014 has been completed through various processes and certified by Cambodian Ministry of Health in November 2017 as introduced on the page of “Cambodia Nutrition Education and Promotion Project.”
(In April 2017, the development of RDA became a part of Cambodia Nutrition Education and Promotion Project.)

RDA developed in the project indicates the daily amount of energy and each nutrient for sustaining our healthy life. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) conducts National Health and Nutrition Survey annually and revises RDA every five years based on results of the survey. Nutritionists and nutrition specialists plan a menu for schools or hospitals in order to meet RDA as much as possible.

When we started Hospital Diet Assistant Project, the previous project of Nutrition and Diet Management Project, at National Pediatric Hospital (NPH) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 2006, the problem that nutrition specialists from Japan faced was that there was no RDA in Cambodia.
Therefore, we started the project by planning a meal menu referring to RDAs of other ASEAN member states. Now, Cambodia has its own RDA, and we began to plan a meal menu based on Cambodian RDA.

Several years have passed since we devised the meal menu at NPH. While some patients are pleased with the menu, saying that NPH provides good and tasty meals, not all patients are satisfied with the quality and taste.
Furthermore, cooks serving meals to the patients every day and talking in person with them and their parents have made some suggestions for further improvement, such as cooking method, seasoning, ingredients, etc., so that very young patients could eat easily. Referring to the feedback from patients and these proposals from the cooks, Nutrition Department of NPH began to work on revising the meal menu.

First of all, we collected feedback on the meal by interviewing parents who came to NPH with patients.
From now on, this project is proceeding with making prototypes based on proposals from the cooks and adjusting an amount of ingredients by calculating nutritive value. Revising the meal menu requires a long way.
The process includes making prototypes many times and finding a menu that satisfies nutritive value and fitting into budget.

This project reminds us that a lot of work and consideration are made behind providing meals at schools or hospitals, which Japanese people take for granted. These hard work and consideration would be very significant because they contribute to providing better meals for children.