Salt

Double-fortified salt – developed by U of T research – fights iron deficiency in India

ullahnor — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 20:22:08 +0000

Double-fortified salt – developed by U of T research – fights iron deficiency in India

ullahnor Wed, 02/15/2017 - 15:22

Cutline

Professor Levente Diosady (centre) and his team developed a way to fortify salt with both iron and iodine. The product is now being distributed to more than 24 million people in India’s Uttar Pradesh state (photo by Mark Balson)

Tyler Irving

Author legacy

Tyler Irving

Topic

Global Lens

Salt

Iron

Malnutrition

Diet

development

India

Micronutrients

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Gates Foundation

Double-fortified salt – developed at U of T to add more iron and iodine to the diets of those who don't get enough – is now being distributed to 24 million people in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India.

The Tata Trusts, India’s largest charitable foundation, is supporting the state government to procure and distribute the product while the government of Uttar Pradesh is spending more than $40 million to purchase the salt and make it available to low income consumers at subsidized prices.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the product in reducing iron and iodine deficiencies across the population.

“We’re very excited to see our invention being distributed on such a massive scale” says U of T professor Levente Diosady, who specializes in food engineering at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “The opportunity for engineers to make a difference in the lives of people living with malnutrition is incredible.”

More than twenty years ago, Diosady was approached by Venkatesh Mannar, then a senior advisor to UNICEF, who wanted him to do some simple chemical tests on formulations for double fortified salt.

Mannar’s mission was to address deficiencies in micronutrients, vitamins and minerals needed in small but regular amounts by the human body. Lack of these nutrients can reduce overall health with huge personal and economic impact worldwide.

Ratan Tata (centre, with flowers), chairman of Tata Trusts, is congratulated by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh at the launch of the double-fortified salt distribution program (photo courtesy of the Micronutrient Initiative)

Perhaps the biggest success story in the micronutrient world is iodized salt. Many governments around the world have mandated the enrichment of salt – an inexpensive food item consumed regularly by all people – with iodine as a means to ensure that nutritional needs are met.

“Venkatesh was born into a salt-producing family, and he knew how well iodized salt was working in places where it had been tried,” says Diosady. “He wanted to see if we could do the same with iron.”

Iron deficiency leads to anemia, a condition that leaves people feeling tired and weak, making it harder to work or study. According to the World Health Organization, iron deficiency is currently the most common and widespread nutritional disorder in the world, affecting more than two billion people, and a major contributor to maternal mortality.

But Diosady’s tests showed why iron couldn’t be added to salt in the same way as iodine: the two elements reacted with each other, converting the iodine into a form that simply evaporated away.

Undeterred, Diosady and his team began developing a method for encapsulating the iron so that it wouldn’t react with the iodine. Eventually, they packaged ferrous fumarate, an iron-rich compound, into tiny edible particles that look and feel nearly identical to salt grains, and which dissolve when consumed. These particles enabled the iron to be mixed with iodized salt, resulting in a double-fortified product.

Soon after, Mannar joined the new Micronutrient Initiative as its president and continued to work with U of T food engineers on programs that proved the acceptability, safety and effectiveness of the double-fortified salt. The results of early trials showed a significant reduction in rates of anemia among children who received the product as part of their school meals.

Today, double-fortified salt produced in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu is being added to school lunches provided to more than five million children in the state through a program supported by the Canadian International Development Agency.

The expansion of the project to the state of Uttar Pradesh was a much larger undertaking, requiring even further scale-up of manufacturing.

U of T Engineering, through a grant agreement from Canada’s International Development Research Centre, is supporting the transfer of technology to India and scale up and roll out of the product to 4.6 million families in Uttar Pradesh. Diosady and Mannar, who is now an adjunct professor at U of T, are co-investigators on the project.

“When we started, we were producing 100 grams at a time in the lab,” says Diosady. “The first order from Uttar Pradesh for the month of January 2017 alone is for 6,000 tonnes.”

Meanwhile, Diosady and his team have continued their research.

They are developing ways to encapsulate other micronutrients, such as folic acid and vitamin B12, with the hopes of making a quadruple-fortified salt. They are also working on adding iron to tea.

“Tea, like salt, is widely consumed in predictable amounts in India and South Asia” says Diosady. “If we can get an iron-fortified tea into the hands of every tea-seller, there is the potential for a very beneficial health effect.”

Shaking the sodium: Food industry needs to do more

lavende4 — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 09:15:03 +0000

Shaking the sodium: Food industry needs to do more

lavende4 Tue, 04/26/2016 - 05:15

Cutline

(photo by Tom Kelley/Getty Images)

Heidi Singer

Author legacy

Heidi Singer

Topic

Research & Innovation

Read the Ottawa Citizen story

See the CTV coverage

“Most of the sodium Canadians consume comes from packaged and processed food,” says JoAnne Arcand, co-author and assistant professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Health Sciences, who completed the research while a postdoctoral fellow at U of T. “Food manufacturers need to lower the sodium levels in the foods they produce for this public health strategy to be effective.”

The Health Canada strategy outlined a series of voluntary sodium reduction benchmark targets aimed at helping Canadians reduce their intake to 2300 mg per day by 2016.

Canadians’ sodium intake generally exceeds 3400 mg per day — more than double the recommended amount of 1500 mg and well over the daily maximum limit of 2300 mg set by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a non-profit organization that provides evidence-based research and recommendations to the Canadian and US governments for public health and science policy. The IOM oversaw the scientific reviews conducted by Canadian and American scientists to set nutrient recommendations for the North American population. Though sodium is an essential nutrient, too much of it can cause high blood pressure, which in turn could lead to a stroke, heart disease and kidney disease.

“Those sodium reduction targets weren’t to get us down to the recommended level; they were to get us down to the upper level,” says Mary L’Abbé, Earle W. McHenry Professor and Chair of Nutritional Sciences at U of T. “It was envisioned as the first step in a longer process of getting our sodium levels to about half of what they are now.”

The team looked at the progress made in a variety of food categories between 2010 and 2013. They saw excellent progress in the following categories: imitation seafood; condiments; breakfast cereals; canned vegetables and legumes; plain potato chips; hot cereals; meat substitutes; canned, condensed soup; and sausages and wieners.

“In some other categories, there were modest improvements, of about five to 10 per cent,” says L’Abbé. “This is still encouraging because the targets were set based on a 25 to 30 per cent reduction over six years. So, as long as the progress continues at a similar rate, those manufacturers are obviously well along the way. But it is still disappointing to see there are still around three-quarters of the food categories that haven`t yet started to lower sodium levels.”

Arcand was also involved in an earlier study by L’Abbé’s lab, which found Canadians generally respond well to food packages with low-sodium claims. According to Arcand, there is consumer demand for lower sodium foods and it’s up to the food industry to produce those lower sodium products so that consumers have the choice.

“Traditionally, poor consumer acceptance of reduced-sodium products has been an argument for not reformulating the amount of sodium in packaged foods,” says Arcand. “But we have data that indicates that many Canadians do want lower sodium.”

There is no official monitoring and evaluation program to track how well Health Canada’s sodium reduction strategy is working. Arcand and L’Abbé hope to further study the food industry’s progress as the strategy reaches its deadline at the end of 2016.

Salt

Double-fortified salt – developed by U of T research – fights iron deficiency in India

Shaking the sodium: Food industry needs to do more

Read the Ottawa Citizen story

See the CTV coverage

See the CBC coverage