Arrival in Utrecht

Last Thursday evening, I arrived in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where I will be working with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), a non-profit organization (NPO) that aims to improve the consumption of nutritious and safe food for all people. For my thesis project, I am looking into possible climate change mitigation and adaptation effects of large-scale food fortification. Anthropogenic climate change is a major global threat, and is associated with sea level rise, more extreme and unpredictable weather as well as more natural disasters such as floods and droughts. Food fortification, which is adding vitamins and minerals to foods that are commonly consumed foods to alleviate or decrease the risks of micronutrient deficiency, could indirectly help people to cope better with climate change or potentially act as a lower-emission alternative to satisfy the micronutrient requirement for populations.

A view of the canal in Utrecht city centre

After some intensive house-hunting, online and off-line, I finally found a room for the duration of my internship, and even had a little time to explore the city of Utrecht. As the fourth largest city of the Netherlands, it is a fairly large and busy city, with of lots of shops, canals and bicycles! This city used to be the cultural and religious centre of the Netherlands and today it is known for being the central hub for transport.

Giant whale statue made of 5 tonnes of plastic waste from the ocean. Gets us thinking about the other 150 million still swimming out there…

I started to work at GAIN this week, and thanks to the helpful team of staff members, I am settling in relatively quickly. It has also been interesting to see how GAIN operates. GAIN has multiple offices scattered around Africa, Asia, North America and Europe, and as a result, much of the work involves online video calls and meetings. I had the opportunity to listen in during internal video meetings where different departments shared what projects they have been working on.This started to orient me as to the scope and nature of GAIN’s world-wide programmes.

Now that I am more settled it is time to continue with my literature review…

Why Food Fortification?

Food fortification is a practice which decreases the risk of micronutrient deficiencies by adding micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, to foods. It is considered to be one of the most important strategies to address micronutrient deficiencies on a global scale because food fortification schemes target foods consumed by the majority of world populations, such as wheat, flour and rice.

In the industrialized world, there has been widespread success in reducing population-wide vitamin A, thiamine (vitamin B1), iodine, and niacin (vitamin B3) deficiencies, to mention just a few (World Health Organization 2006, Dwyer et al. 2015). I am certain that you have likely come across milk fortified with Vitamin D, or fortified breakfast cereals. In the developing world, while there is some progress reducing micronutrient deficiencies, much work is still needed, as iron, vitamin A, iodine and zinc deficiencies are still fairly high. In fact, according to the Global Nutrition Report of 2018, almost 2 billion people worldwide suffer from micronutrient deficiencies (Development Initiatives, 2018).

From: World Health Organization 2015. The global prevalence of anaemia in 2011.
Geneva: World Health Organization.

Climate change is likely to increase the disease burden from micronutrient deficiencies. A study showed that increased carbon dioxide levels associated with climate change and changing decreased iron concentrations in wheat, rice, legumes and maize crops (Smith, Golden & Myers 2017). Similary, reseachers in NUI Galway found that beans grown in future drought-conditions induced by climate change will not only contain less iron, but also contain more anti-nutritional compounds such as lead and phytic acid (Hummel et al. 2018). Further large-scale food fortification programmes may be required to address this by adding nutrients back in to staples in order to achieve adequate micronutrient intakes in populations.

Citations:

Dwyer, J.T., Wiemer, K.L., Dary, O., Keen, C.L., King, J.C., Miller, K.B.,  Philbert, M.A.,Tarasuk, V., Taylor, C.L., Gaine, P.C., Jarvis, A.B. and Bailey, R.L. (2015) Fortification and Health: Challenges and Opportunities. Advances in Nutrition, 6(1), pp. 124– 131, https://doi.org/10.3945/an.114.007443.

Development Initiatives, 2018. 2018 Global Nutrition Report: Shining a light to spur action on nutrition. Bristol, UK: Development Initiatives

World Health Organization. (‎2006)‎. Guidelines on food fortification with micronutrients. World Health Organization. http://www.who.int/iris/handle/10665/43412

Smith, M.R., Golden, C.D., Myers, S.S. (2017) Potential rise in iron deficiency due to future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. GeoHealth, 1(6), pp.248–257. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GH000018

Hummel, M., Hallahan, B.F., Brychkova, G., Ramirez-Villegas, J., Guwela, V., Chataika, B., Curley, E., Morrison, L., Talsma, E., Beebe, S., Jarvis, A., Chirwa, R., and Spillane, C., (2018) Decline in nutritional quality of common bean under climate change induced drought stress in Africa. Nature Scientific Reports 8:16187. https://doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-33952-4.