November 27, 2018

Flour Fortification

by Pinar Erdal, Mirpain Milling & Baking Ingredients, Turkey

Vitamins and minerals are organic compounds that are needed in small quantities to sustain life. Different vitamins and minerals have different roles and their absence will cause serious disease.

People need vitamins and minerals in their diets, because their bodies cannot synthesise them quickly enough to meet their daily needs and vitamins are essential for normal physiologic function. If there is poverty about vitamins in diet, it will cause a specific deficiency. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated the required average nutrient intakes for a healthy person, which is often not reached.
 
image credit: Mirpain
 Food systems often fail to deliver foods sufficiently rich in essential vitamins and minerals. This failure is due to poor availability, access, affordability, and use of inappropriate foods. It causes widespread micronutrient deficiencies and their negative health consequences, which affect over 1.6 billion people around the world.

Wheat is an important cereal crop and, together with maize and rice, accounts for 94 percent of total cereal consumption worldwide. To obviate the deficiency of vitamin and minerals, flour fortification has an important role.

Food fortification is a practice of adding one or more essential nutrients to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply. Fortification of industrially processed wheat flour, when approximately implemented, is an effective, simple, and inexpensive strategy for supplying vitamins and minerals to the diets of large segments of the world’s population.

Wheat flour fortification should be considered when industrially produced flour is regularly consumed by large population groups in a country. Wheat fortification programmes could be expected to be most effective in achieving a public health impact if mandated at the national level and can help achieve international public health goals. Decisions about which nutrients should be added, and the proper amounts to add to flour for fortification, should be based on a series of factors, according to nutritional needs and deficiencies of the populations; the usual consumption profile of fortified flour.

In the less industrialised countries, fortification has become an increasingly attractive option in recent years, so much so that planned programmes have moved forward to the implementation phase more rapidly than previously thought possible. Globally 87 countries have legislation to mandate fortification of at least one industrially milled cereal grain.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


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