Tag: study

More on methodology

In this post I will walk you through how I put together an inventory for LCA. I use margarine as an example here.
I wanted to find out the carbon footprints associated with producing margarine globally. After doing some researching of margarine products online, I realized there is no *one * standardized way to produce margarine, the ingredients vary from country to country and also among margarine producers…so I decided to do my LCAs based on all the formulations I could find, and then I would calculate an average value based on the global warming potential I calculated for each formulation.
Firstly, I searched for LCA studies on margarine- and I found one that one included detailed information on the composition of 4 different margarines products (from 4 different European countries):

Comparative life cycle assessment of margarine and butter consumed in the UK, Germany and France. Nilsson et al. (2010).

Next, I looked for more formulations online…

It was hard to find more detailed margarine formulations, as margarine products often consisted of multiple edible oil varieties (such as soya oil, palm oil/palm kernel oil, sunflower oil,etc.) and while the percentage of total edible oils used was given in the ingredients list, I had no idea how much of each was used to produce the margarine.
Eventually, I found one product that had only one edible oil ingredient- margarine made of palm oil here.

It didn’t specify amounts for food additives…so I made the assumption that the amounts of food additives added were low, and therefore overall impact would be low as well.
In the end I had margarine formulation data for 4 countries and put them all in one Excel file.

I worked out the amounts needed to produce one tonne of margarine using each country’s formulation, and then multiplied that by the carbon footprint data per kg of the respective product from LCA databases.

Study on vitamin D fortification of flour

I have a new exciting study on vitamin D fortification to report.

So I was pleased to come across a recent study on large scale food fortification of with vitamin D, conducted by researchers of the University of Birmingham. Vitamin D fortification is important because vitamin D is only found in some foods such as oily fish, meat and eggs, and while you can get it from sun exposure, the intensity of UVB radiation (responsible for converting pre-vitamin D to vitamin D) depends on the season

The study showed that if vitamin D fortification of flour became mandatory by law, it would decrease the prevalence of VD deficiency by 10 million cases (25% of total estimated cases) in the next 90 years. This would also be a rather low-cost intervention, at a cost of 0.12 British Pounds per person. Additionally, a free supplementation scheme targeted at-risk population groups, such as children and ethnic minority groups would potentially decrease the prevalence by a further 33%.
Personally, I think flour fortification with vitamin D would be a good idea, as flour is a more widely consumed food commodity compared to margarine, and this may also extend to certain minority groups. However, I am curious about how the cost of the supplementation, as supplementation generally costs more and how the cost/benefit ratio compares to large scale fortification.