In this issue of Abstract Digest, we present to you a collection of articles on various outcomes, determinants and interventions related to maternal and child nutrition, from around the world and India, in particular. Additionally, we bring to you two salient reports, which have been released recently. UNICEF’s Children, Food and Nutrition: Growing well in a changing world highlights the state of the world’s children in 2019. India’s Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey provides significant information on malnutrition, anemia and micronutrient deficiencies among children and adolescents in India.

This last issue of the Abstract Digest for 2016 brings to focus the importance of maternal factors including pre- and peri-conceptional nutrition, education and stature, as well as macro-level factors such as sustained economic growth and investments in health, education, and water for the overall well-being of a child.

In this 40th issue of the POSHAN Abstract Digest, we bring to you a collection of articles on the burden of malnutrition in India, its distribution patterns and determinants. You will find several articles focused on nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive solutions aimed at improving nutritional outcomes and determinants. This issue also features two articles on data for nutrition, one pertaining to data availability for nutrition financing in India and another describing the current situation of reliable biomarker data availability on micronutrient deficiencies at the global level. We have also included a small section on COVID-19 focused peer-reviewed articles.

This issue of Abstract Digest comes to you at a time when the global nutrition research community is actively looking for ways to address malnutrition in the changing context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The articles in this issue include a modelling study by Roberton and colleagues on early estimates of the indirect effects of COVID-19 pandemic on maternal and child mortality in low-income and middle-income countries, and comments on it.

This issue of the Abstract Digest features our new Policy Note, summarizing costs of delivering a set of essential nutrition interventions at scale in India. We also bring to you the new WHO guidelines for improving the quality of maternal and newborn health and infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices, two Alive & Thrive studies on IYCF, work on the performance of anganwadis under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), models for the management of severe acute malnutrition (SAM), and studies on ICDS and health programs that deliver the essential nutrition interventions in India.

We are delighted to present to you the first issue of Abstract Digest for this year. This issue has two important LANCET Commission Reports. The EAT–Lancet Commission is the first of a series of initiatives on nutrition, led by The Lancet in 2019, followed by the Commission on the Global Syndemic of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. Along with these, we have articles from an issue of Public Health Nutrition that focuses on child and adolescent nutrition, and much more.

This issue of the Abstract Digest features the 2015 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report, the 2015 Global Nutrition Report, the India Health Report, two special supplements focused on child feeding, and several other interesting articles on nutrition and health