PHM-Exch> Reaction to the EAT Lancet posting in phm-exchange

[Claudio Schuftan]

from: Ted Greiner <tedgreiner at yahoo.com>
Thu, 5 Dec, 05:16 (1 day ago)




Below is a comment to this posting.

It is misleading to say only that fortifying rice with iron has no effect
on anemia. That is rarely if ever the goal, keeping in mind that half or
more of anemia is usually not related to iron deficiency.

More relevant, but not mentioned by Dr. Karpagam, is that the Cochran
review found that iron fortified rice may reduce iron deficiency and
increase mean hemoglobin. In my experience, when it does not have an impact
on hemoglobin, it usually does have an impact on serum ferritin or storage
iron, which indicator is not reported-on in the Cochran review.

Many countries now fortify wheat and/or maize with iron and folic acid (to
prevent neural tube defects). In a heavily rice eating population (which
includes many countries in LA and Africa and most of the southern areas of
Asia), this approach misses the opportunity offered by doing the same with
rice--which is rarely fortified today.

The simpler approach for fortifying rice (cold extrusion) increases the
cost by about 3%, far less than normal market price fluctuations. Much of
the global donor community is instead mainly promoting the much more costly
and extremely complex hot extrusion method owned by the transnational
DSM--who also gave WFP one million dollars to use their technology.
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