Hey everyone!
I found an interesting review involving global mapping of Food fortification for the year 2016 . Below are some insightful points on why fortification of certain foods is significant to populations.
The deficiencies of important vitamins and minerals (also known as ‘hidden hunger’) have brought on significant public health problems globally. This has been a worse case, specifically for low and middle-income countries. Major prevalent micro-nutrient deficiencies (MNDs) include that of iron and vitamin A deficiencies.
According to Bailey et al., 2015 , an estimated 0.8 million annual deaths worldwide are linked to iron deficiency and 40-60% of children between the age group of 6-24 months are vulnerable in low and middle-income countries. Vitamin A deficiency is a primary cause of childhood morbidity and mortality, been a leading cause of preventable blindness in children affecting 250-500 million children worldwide.
Micro-nutrient deficiencies scarcely occurs in isolation, whereby multiple MNDs usually occur concurrently majorly driven by a lack of food security and dietary diversity. Generally, MNDs are widespread as shown in the fig 1 below, with significant health and economic consequences where economic losses in low and middle income countries approximately range from 2-5% of gross domestic product.
It is unfortunate that , as studies show, the cycle of micro-nutrient inadequacies continue across the life span as described in the fig 2 below.
The three major complementary approaches to optimizing nutrient intake among communities has been to enhancing dietary diversification, supplementation and food fortification(Fleischhacker, 2019). While consumption of a diverse diet is the primary long-term goal ideal, it is far from been a daily reality for many people due to combination of limited access (availability and affordability) of diverse foods (Garrett and Haddad, 2017). Supplementation, while essential for treatment of deficiencies where they exist and prevention of deficiencies where groups in the community may be vulnerable (example; pregnant women and children of under-five years of age)(Beal et al., 2017), such programmes are expensive to implement universally (Garrett and Haddad, 2017). Food fortification, involving the enrichment of micro-nutrient in staple foods commonly consumed by populations has proven to be a more sustainable and effective approach to improving the health and well-being of large numbers of vulnerable people(Beal et al., 2017)
Over the years, food fortification has proven to be advantageous as it requires less change in consumer food habits and behaviors than other nutrition-based interventions and is likely more cost-effective (Osendarp et al., 2018, Bishai and Nalubola, 2002)
Nora