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There is more to good nutrition than calories and protein. The realisation that you can be perfectly well fed, maybe even too well fed, and yet still malnourished, is relatively recent. It often goes by the name hidden hunger, and reflects a lack of essential micronutrients in the diet. Tackling the lack of micronutrients is tricky because people do not really feel their hidden hunger. “No-one wakes up saying ‘I crave vitamin A today’,” as a recent paper put it.
That paper looks back over the 25-year history of the most successful effort to feed hidden hunger to date: the introduction of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes to subSaharan Africa. The beta-carotene that makes sweet potatoes orange is the precursor of vitamin A, one of the most important micronutrients. In this episode, I’m talking to Dr Jan Low, who has worked on orange-fleshed sweet potato from the start.
Notes
- The paper by Jan Low and Graham Thiele is Understanding innovation: The development and scaling of orange-fleshed sweetpotato in major African food systems and, oh joy, it is freely available.
- Banner photograph by Benjamin Rakotoarisoa.
- As mentioned in the episode, as an experiment I am going to try and provide a transcript, at least for a little while. Find it here.
- Work on vitamin-A rich sweet potatoes is carried out under the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB).
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About two billion people around the world do not get enough micronutrients in their diet. This lack of vitamins and minerals — often called hidden hunger — has severe and lasting effects on individuals and their societies. One very popular approach to tackling hidden hunger is known as biofortification, engineering or selecting varieties of staple crops so that they produce higher levels of one micronutrient or another. On the surface, this makes perfect sense. Hidden hunger is strongly correlated with the amount of energy people get from staples, so putting more micronutrients in those staples ought to be a good thing, except that there’s little evidence that it works and yields of biofortified staples are generally lower than those of unfortified varieties. That’s a waste of land that could be used to grow the fruits and vegetables that contribute to a more diverse diet, which offers a far better approach to micronutrient deficiencies.
All this and more is brought out in a recent paper in the journal Global Food Security. I interviewed one of the authors.
Notes
What is Wrong with Biofortification, by Maarten van Ginkel and Jeremy Cherfas, can be read in Global Food Security.
A previous episode examined orange-fleshed sweet potato to feed hidden hunger, and there was evidence that OFSP can increase vitamin A status in children. I didn’t ask about yield.
Here is the transcript.
Banner photograph from Western Bengal, by Krishnasis Ghosh for The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
Huffduff it
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#MoreThanFood, the #sweetpotato can improve #nutrition, foster business and #employment opportunities and help build #climateresilience @CGIAR @RTB_CGIAR @Cipotato eatthispodcast.com/ofsp/
#nowlistening: @JanLow1 of @Cipotato and @WorldFoodPrize laureate talking Orange-flesh sweet potato, vitamin A and biofortification on @EatPodcast eatthispodcast.com/ofsp/#t=51 #NutritionMonth #March4Nutrition
Jeremy, this is another intriguing episode. You always leave me thinking and seeing the world differently.
All about @Cipotato work on sweet potato breeding for vitamin A @HarvestPlus
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Latest episode: a new old food slowly gains ground. #ofsp
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