Thoughts on Nutrition in our Modern Argicultural World
According to the October 10th Economist, part of the global nutritional crisis is “soluble.”
Approximately one third of the world’s people suffer from a lack of micronutrients. Micronutrients are “any substance, such as a vitamin or trace element, essential for healthy growth and development but required only in minute amounts” More specifically, micronutrients in food include essential things such as: folic acid, iron, vitamin D and iodine. Although they are consumed in minute amounts, the have profound implications on our health and wellbeing.
According to the World Health Organization, “these substances are the “magic wands” that enable the body to produce enzymes, hormones and other substances essential for proper growth and development. As tiny as the amounts are, however, the consequences of their absence are severe. Iodine, vitamin A and iron are most important in global public health terms; their lack represents a major threat to the health and development of populations the world over, particularly children and pregnant women in low-income countries.”
The proposal to address this problem is to enrich food staples and salts with micronutrients. It is true that enriching food staples such as adding iodine to salt and vitamin D to milk has been practiced in the US for a long time and is a primary cause in the elimination of nutrition based diseases such as rickets. Also, the article correctly notes that the cost of fortifying food stables with micronutrients is extremely cost efficient.
But, doesn’t this seem a bit like treating symptoms instead of treating problems?
The problem is not exclusively a lack of access to foods containing micronutrients. In all reality, the problem is a lack of access to an entire diet capable of meeting the current nutritional needs of people.
In a sense, fortifying food staples is the somewhat the nutritional equivalent of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The situation is akin to switching from regular to diet drinks as a way to regulate sugar and calorie consumption. The switch comes with the trade off of increased caffeine consumption as well as increased exposure to artificial sweeteners. At the end of the day, all you are doing is playing a game of nutritional three card monty by trading one bad thing for another.
It is critically important to ask what food staples that will be fortified. If fortified food products in the US serve as an example, they will be highly refined or processed, bearing little-to-no resemblance to their traditional form or place in a person’s regional or ancestral diet.
Considering:
“[When we eat refined foods] … we limit the opportunity to bolster our immune system, keep our blood sugar and emotions balanced, keep our blood sugar and emotions balanced, protect against degenerative diseases, maintain a trim and fit body, and in general, keep our integrated experience of life harmonious.”
“Our desire to overeat can stem from eating foods that are refined and therefore missing ingredients; these deficient foods can foster addiction as we are instinctively driven to over consume them in our endeavor to obtain the missing nutrients that are never there.”
Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford (2002 edition) pgs 16 -18
And, according to Harriet V. Kuhnlein, Professor of Human Nutrition and Founding Director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at McGill University in Montreal, Canada:
The development, health and scientific communities do not usually understand the food resources that indigenous people know and use. Scientific identifications and laboratory data for nutrients and other phytochemicals for a food system may be unknown for many species.
A possibly better solution to this issue might be re-examining and then reintroducing traditional dietary and agricultural practices “upgraded” for current daily life instead relying upon artificially fortifying foods derived from highly refined and processed foods frequently from foreign sources and diets.
