Vitamin and mineral deficiencies cause colossal economic losses through morbidity and mortality of women and children, reduced cognitive development in children, decreased work productivity in adults and increased disabilities.
This has prompted oil fortification, involving adding essential vitamins and minerals to oil as it is processed, which makes foods prepared with fortified oil more nutritious. Iron, zinc, folic acid, and other B vitamins are commonly added to oil.
Across the country, edible oil processors have agreed to fortify cooking oil with Vitamin A. This involves increasing the content of essential micronutrients.
TechnoServe, an international organisation, is promoting food fortification by enlightening producers on standards for the fortification of vegetable oil.
However, it believes the key component of a successful food fortification programme is regulatory monitoring by which the private and public sectors collaborate to produce high quality fortified food.
It is collaborating with BASF – a leading global manufacturer of micronutrients and BioAnalyst – and pioneer of on-the-spot micronutrient analysis to train local processors on quality control in food fortification organisations.
The aim is to empower processors not only to increase food security and local economic growth, but also support ongoing national food fortification campaign designed to increase access to enhanced foods.
To drive this, a regional trainings have been conducted in Lagos and Owerri, where edible oil processors were exposed to global best practices.
The Programme Manager, Strengthening African Processors of Fortified Foods Project (SAPFF), Techno Serve Nigeria, Ms. Ayodele Tella, said: “The training seeks to address the challenges affecting processors in fortifying their products with Vitamin A and how to get fortification right, starting from procurement of the vitamin fortificant, to storage, application and internal monitoring and control.”
She said the cumulative effects of malnutrition, some of which are increase in healthcare spending and reduced productivity of the citizens, costs the country about 10per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is at $420 billion.
She said food fortification remained the most cost effective method of reducing micro-nutrient deficiency in the country and that Nigeria needed to spend about $50million on it yearly for its 200million people, going by the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) cost for food fortification of $0.5 to $0.25 per person yearly.
TechnoServe, through SAPFF initiative, is increasing the compliance level of processors in fortification of their products with essential micronutrients by understanding their challenges and helping them in closing the gaps.
It is doing this by using a first time market-based approach to solving the problem of low industry compliance.
Global Application Specialist, Food Fortification & Technical Marketing, BASF, Mr. Claus Soendergaard, who trained the processors on quality control and compliance, said food fortification is a long-term and complementary strategy to tackle hunger.
He advised processors to always protect their Vitamin A as well as products already fortified with it from sunlight, as excessive light penetration causes degradation.
Soendergaard trained the processors on how to calculate the dosage of Vitamin A in a litre of oil. He specified that 23IU/g is the recommended dosage by the Federal Government for edible oil fortification with Vitamin A.
The Managing Director, BioAnalyt – a product innovator of diagnostics and food testing, Mrs Anna Zhenchuk, said Vitamin A has more stability in oil than in sugar because the air around it can penetrate the particles and is a natural environment for oil.
SOURCE: THE NATION
