Whole Story

Vitamin Angels is an organization that is deeply impacting the lives of children around the world. In part one of our two-part conversation with founder Howard Schiffer, hear firsthand about his travels in the developing world and how Vitamin Angels is helping to break the cycle of poverty.

Howard Schiffer is the founder of Vitamin Angels and the recipient of numerous awards recognizing his accomplishments for helping to reduce child mortality by providing essential nutrients to at-risk children around the world.

Vitamin Angels founder Howard Schiffer travels all over the world to reach children in need of essential nutrients:

• Howard recently returned from Peru and visited small mountain villages in the Andes located between 13,500-14,500’ elevation.
• Due to the climate, the diet at those altitudes is extremely limited, and the rates of malnutrition and associated illness are high.
• Yet in each of the villages he heard testimonials from the mothers about how their pregnancies were improved, and the birth weights of their babies were higher after taking the prenatal vitamins.
• Howard also met a professor who shared that the children were more alert, doing better in school and attendance rates were considerably improved when the children began taking daily multivitamins.

The impact Vitamin Angels has on children and mothers in the developing world is profound:

• One third of all child and maternal deaths are due to chronic malnutrition.
• Most of the children who are born in the developing world today will never reach their full intellectual or structural capacity from the day they are born, due to the chronic malnutrition of their mothers before they were even conceived.
• The damage that gets done before a child is 2 years old is often irreversible. Conversely, reaching children early enough can have a profound impact on the rest of their lives.
• Children who receive the nutrients they need to develop properly often do better in school, and with an education they often take jobs that earn more money and allow them to break the cycle of poverty.

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