CALS graduate student studies childhood growth stunting in Guatemala

While speaking with a woman who owned a small community store — a tiendita — that sold food to local families in Guatemala’s Momostenango region, University of Idaho graduate student Rita Franco noticed the woman’s daughter was underweight.

During the conversation, Franco realized the store owner was so focused on trying to make a living selling food to her neighbors that she wasn’t feeding her own daughter enough.

Born in Guatemala and raised in El Salvador, Franco understands the challenges in teaching locals about developing and maintaining good nutritional habits in an effort to help prevent childhood growth stunting.

“Momostenango is a very rural area — lots of indigenous people and lots of poverty,” said Franco, who is on track to receive her doctorate in nutritional sciences from U of I’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS) in Spring 2027. “The biggest challenge is explaining the problem to them. If you ask them why everybody in the village is short, they say that it’s always been like that. They don’t understand that part of the problem is stunting and that it can be fixed.”

Franco recently concluded her research for Ginny Lane, assistant professor at the CALS Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences, about the relationship between egg consumption and decreased odds of childhood growth stunting in Guatemala. Franco’s project won first place in the 2025 Idaho Three-Minute Thesis competition.

Recipe for success

Franco’s work prior to coming to University of Idaho made her the perfect candidate to research childhood stunting. She spent 15 years studying nutrition for organizations such as the United Way and the World Central Kitchen, developing recipes to help educate parents about better nutritional practices.

“It was difficult for me to see the reality of the public health problems in Guatemala when I returned,” Franco said. “At that time, Guatemala had the most stunted children in Latin America.”

Working full-time while completing both bachelor's and master’s degrees in Guatemala, Franco began thinking about strategies to help families understand how protein — and eggs specifically — could play a part in preventing childhood stunting.

One of the biggest factors for stunting is a lack of protein and key vitamins in a child’s diet. Eggs are one of the best ways to address the problem but in areas like Momostenango, eggs are not always easily attainable or affordable.

“Families know eggs are a good protein source for children but some mothers say they cannot get them even one egg a day because they don’t have enough money,” Franco said.

Because she worked for several years in a peanut butter factory, Franco knew that peanut butter is a cheaper, and usually more accessible, substitute for eggs — although it was not as popular with Guatemalans.

“Peanut butter is not really culturally acceptable in Guatemala — people there don’t trust it that much,” she said. “It also does not absorb into the body as well as an egg and doesn’t have the same amount of vitamins. Eating an egg is like taking a multivitamin.”

What Franco wanted to show local families was that egg consumption was important for children, while also providing ideas on how to find — or produce — enough eggs to supply to their families.

Constructing a solution

Through a mutual friend, Franco was introduced to Lane in 2023. Lane had already started researching this topic in 2019, setting up a field study with 10 rural families in Guatemala with young children and no history of egg allergies. The families constructed chicken coops, then purchased hens and feed. Children in each family consumed at least one egg a day.

Franco came to U of I in Fall 2023 and joined Lane in Guatemala in 2024 to follow up with those families. The data showed significant height-for-age growth based on the children’s egg consumption.

“This is very important information because if a child has normal development through their first 1,000 days, stunting can be prevented,” Franco said. “If they are stunted by age three, their brain will not fully develop and they will not fully recover.”

Even though data supports the consumption of eggs reducing the chances of childhood stunting, the bigger challenge in areas like Momostenango is to keep the momentum of feeding eggs to children moving forward by making sure families have the resources to either buy or produce eggs regularly.

“Unfortunately, it’s a really difficult issue to deal with in Guatemala,” Lane said. “It’s very challenging to get the resources where they are needed to make sure children have access to nutritious food and the government is very inconsistent with delivering on programs to help.”

Despite the challenge, Franco believes the effort to convince people in rural Guatemala to change their habits is worth it.

“This research is important to me because we’re showing that egg consumption can help prevent stunting,” she said. “This information can help the next generation of people in Guatemala. It can change my country.”