Fortification and Restoration of Processed Foods R. R. WILLIAb/lS, Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York, N. Y. has a bearing on what may be considered proper labeling and advertising of a food. Kitchen customs are often important. In short, before he is through with the matter, the honest and careful student of the problem will find that he has roamed through large areas of nutritional and physiological science, sociology, economics, education, business practices, and law, and has dabbled a bit in folkways and folklore. However, on this occasion we must be succinct, practical, and specific in our conclusions. To achieve these ends some sort of simplifying principles are necessary. We must assume that the existing social structure, including human habits and customs, is relatively stable and ask ourselves whether the modification of this particular food is, under existing conditions, in the public interest. If the food is a staple of wide distribution and is of such composition as to throw the prevailing diet as a whole out of balance, the food is an appropriate candidate for modification t o correct that fault. If, on the other hand, the food is a distinctive proprietary article of narrow distribution or of limited quantity consumption, the incentive for modifying it is largely commercial. Whether or not the modification of such a food is publicly advantageous depends on a small direct dietary benefit t o the consumers of that food as against the possibility that many other similarly restricted foodstuffs may also undergo competitive modification to hold their markets and thereby subject the public mind and pocketbook to a barrage of ill-coordinated propaganda. I cannot escape the conclusion that the dangers of such promiscuous reinforcement of foods outweigh the benefits, especially if these foods are permitted to be fortified above natural levels.
Artificial reinforcement should be limited to staple foods and kept within the bounds of those kinds and quantities of vitamins which are indigenous to the food in question. This view is based on consideration of the probable evolutionary history of human requirements. Man’s modern diets, while differing greatly from those of prehistoric days, are still approximately average samples of living nature except for certain artificialities, such as cooking foods, decorticating grains, crystallizing sugars, and refining fats. The object of artificial reinforcement should be to repair these damages without introducing new artificialities. There is a problem of distributing vitaminized staples at prices which will not limit their use by the poor. Legislative prohibition of the sale of less nutritively complete varieties, while most direct, is repugnant to our political organization. We must, therefore, resort to popular education by government agencies and to advertising by the food industries. Food laws can be invoked to a limited degree to keep vitaminization practices within the bounds of reason; so also can the powers of the Federal Trade Commission. Food manufacturers, if guided by intelligent expressions of scientific opinion, will act responsibly in the same direction.
Fortikation v s . Restoration There is another question which runs parallel t o the above problem. Shall we encourage the modification of any food so that it will tend to make up the deficiencies of the dietary in general or shall we insist that each food shall be modified only to the extent that is necessary to correct the faults it has acquired in customary processing? Here again the answer from a public standpoint seems fairly clear. To allow one food t o be fortified with excess quantities of vitamins or minerals and with vitamins or minerals which are not indigenous to that type or class of food is to invite multiple corrections of the diet which may add up to a decided overcorrection. Nature knows far more than we do. The causes of many diseases are still obscure. Who knows that we may not aggravate some of them by further departures from Nature’s waye. I wish to declare, therefore, in favor of restoration rather than fortification and t o limit it to staple foods, a view apparently shared by the great majority of students of nutrition. The application of this principle will not solve all problems, but it will serve as a guide for their progressive solution. In stating this view, I am not ignoring the fact that even promiscuous advertising of promiscuously vitaminized foods
W
HEN we consider the systematic artificial reinforcement of a processed food for human use, we must weigh many factors. Most fundamental of all is what group of constituents and how much of each is necessary to the optimum nutrition of man. Another is the composition of the prevailing existing diet and the customary quantitative consumption of the particular food under consideration as compared with that of other foods in the dietary. If the particular food bulks large in the dietary of the whole people or of some economic group or geographical area, that also must be taken into account. We must also reflect that most of the calories ingested by man consist of foods which are and have long been artificially processed, usually by cooking if not otherwise, in a way to modify their nutritional qualities. The state of public intelligence on nutritional matters obviously 718
June, 1941
INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
has a potential educational value. Somehow it seems that our purposeful mass educational processes, whether undertaken by schools or by government agencies, are discouragingly slow. If one wants subject matter to come to popular knowledge quickly, let it become the basis of commercial advertising and let industry pour millions into it. However, in this case it is not merely awareness of vitamins that we wish to inculcate, but a reasonably sound and critical understanding of a rather complicated matter. So it seems wiser to avoid haste and not to escape our present ills by flying into other evils that we know not of. Economic Considerations Socially the greatest problem of the restoration of staple foods is to find means to absorb the added costs so that they will not be reflected in increased prices and thus curtail the use of the improved products by the poor who most need improvement in diet. It is not difficult for a food manufacturer to justify commercially an increase of cost in products which find a market among the well-to-do. An added feature which stimulates sales soon makes up the difference in cost. The highly competitive staples selling a t a low margin of profit present a different problem. As a first step, their vitaminization must be done cheaply. The full answer to this problem can come only in one of two ways, either by compulsory modification so that only the improved product will be available or by infiltration downward from fancy brands of the product to the commoner and cheaper varieties. Thus the vitaminization of nationally advertised brands of flour, for example, will lead sooner or later to a popular demand for cheaper grades similarly vitaminized. We must trust to competition among the elements of industry for the larger, lower priced markets to constitute the incentive for the downward extension of the practice. The alternative of government compulsion would require new legislation. In addition, i t would further violate the spirit of our inherited political institutions to which many of us still attach great importance. How to enforce such restraints upon the use of vitamins in foods presents a host of problems for which no general formula is possible. To a great extent we shall have to rely upon the enforcement of the Federal Food and Drug Act, supplemented by corresponding activity in the several states. Broad powers are available to the authorities to restrict commercial practices which are clearly recognized as contrary to public interest. The enforcement agencies are greatly strengthened in such endeavors by well coordinated expressions of opinion by disinterested authorities on nutrition. They cannot well declare against practices which are sanctioned by some reputable authorities though they may be frowned upon by the majority. A great responsibility, therefore, rests upon the profession of nutritionists to avoid careless endorsements or condemnations of particular food products or practices. They may be grossly misused by special interests. Very useful agencies for the correlation and expression of competent opinion are the Food Cpuncil of the American Medical Association, the American Institute of Nutrition, etc. I n all fairness it must be recognized that the major food industries are very sensitive to public opinion. Broadly speaking the moral tone is high. One cannot fail to be impressed with the broad-minded way in which representatives of competitive food industries customarily sit in conference with one another and with the federal authorities, and fairly recognize the pre-eminence of the public weal. The Federal Trade Commission as well as the several trade associations are powerful agencies to compel conformance from the occasional recalcitrant concern.
719
Deficiencies in Diet The vitamins or minerals that should be added to a given food are those which are indigenous to that food in its native state. The additions should be aimed solely (at least for foods in general) a t repairing the damage done to the food by artificial processing. Through long ages our prehistoric ancestors roamed the woods and plains of many areas of the globe and subsisted on a melange of berries, roots, leaves, bark, insects, and the carcasses of birds or beasts which they could kill or capture. As a race they thus got a fair average sample of the whole of living nature or a t least the digestible portions of it. Their nutritional needs must have become adapted by evolution to the food supply; those with extravagant requirements died off in times of stress and shortage; those who failed to take full advantage of the available variety grew less vigorously and succumbed to competition. Human needs have thus become attuned to the supply. It is true that the diet of modern man contains an assortment of foods very different from that of prehistoric man if compared article by article. However, this does not seriously invalidate evolutionary history as a basis of present needs. In the aggregate, human diets still constitute a fair average sample of living nature. Prehistoric man may have eaten more or less flesh foods than modern man; he probably did not get milk from other species; he ate the produce of wild rather than cultivated plants; the cereal seeds he ate, if any, had not been developed by selection to possess large, fat, starchy cotyledons; the juices he chewed from stalks of wild plants did not contain up to 15 per cent sucrose. No one can add up the sum of these effects with precision, especially as man’s diets have always varied greatly from area to area and from season to season. The best we can do is to assume that man’s present diets approximate his prehistoric diets in respect to vitamin contents, with certain notable exceptions of which we can trace the causes. The evident exceptions are: (1) the general practice of cooking foods which tends to destroy thermally or to wash away certain vitamin and mineral constituents, (2) the relatively modern practice of decorticating rice and wheat, (3) the refining of sugar by crystallization, and (4)the extraction and refining of fats and oils. Our primary attention should be focused on these modern artificialities and particularly on those which are indicated by other evidence to be important. The other evidence is derived chiefly from animal experiments on the one hand and, on the other, clinical observations on the occurrence and therapy of nutritional disorders. When the deviation of man’s dietary from the prehistoric norm, the results of animal experiments, and the clinical evidence of human dietary disease all point in the same direction, we may be certain of a need for prophylactic action as regards the food supply. Particular population groups may suffer from the restricted character of the diet available to them. Thus the fact that rice has so largely displaced other articles of food in many areas of the Orient is a fact that must be taken into account in that region. In our own country the economically depressed group as a whole tends to eat more than its share of the inexpensive foods, such as cereals, and less than its share of the more expensive foods, meat, milk, and eggs. Geographically this tendency is more conspicuous in our South than elsewhere, and it has a great bearing on the pellagra problem. Our urban poor also tend to have more restricted diets than those of rural areas. Politically these are difficult problems to deal with, since class legislation is repugnant to our form of government. It seems that the best thing to be done in such situations is to allow the special interests of particular groups to weight the decision reached in the common interest. To illustrate this point, it has been the recom-
720
INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
mendation of the Advisory Committee on Food and Nutrition of the National Research Council that nicotinic acid be included as a required ingredient in enriched flour for the sake of the pellagra sufferers of the South, even though there is insufficient evidence of a nicotinic acid deficiency among the general population. This modest addition can do no harm to the general population and may be found to confer a wider benefit than we can now prove. Not all important vitamins are yet available synthetically. To some extent there is the possibility of the use of natural concentrates, though these may sometimes introduce undesirable colors, flavors, or interference with keeping qualities. I n many instances our knowledge of the occurrence of the missing vitamins and of human requirements for each of them is too meager to permit intelligent action. Of the vitamins of the B complex, deficiencies of thiamin and of nicotinic acid in certain American diets are well established. Riboflavin represents an intermediate case. mhile there is considerable clinical evidence of widespread deficiency, it is not yet certain that the prevailing dietaries are lower in this nutrient now than a generation or two ago as is the case for thiamin and nicotinic acid. Decortication of grain has somewhat curtailed the riboflavin intake, but since grain is a minor source of this nutrient in any case, this cause seems of doubtful significance. Systematic quantitative studies of the riboflavin content of modern dietaries are much needed. Vitamin C deficiency is not well established for substantial and well defined segments of the population though it is found sporadically and frequently. Vitamin A deficiency seems strongly indicated by the prevalence of night blindness, and has and should receive careful attention in connection with oleomargarine.
Trends in Diet As regards protection against partial deficiencies of the lesser known vitamins, the best measures are diversification of dietaries by inclusion of protective foods as far as possible, and the consumption of foods in general and cereals in particular in their natural or less refined forms. These should be encouraged by education. Certain wholesome trends in food customs and related habits are discernible which should tend to minimize certain dietary deficiencies in the future. The rise in use of milk, the popularity of sun bathing, and the extension of refrigerator shipments which make fresh fruits and vegetables increasingly available a t all seasons are noteworthy. Milk has presented a special problem for vitaminization with D. Because of the modern substitution of cow’s milk for human milk in infant feeding, because of the generally recognized nutritive value of milk for older children, and because of the peculiar needs of the young for vitamin D, a departure from the usual rule seems to have been justified. Fortification of cow’s milk with D t o a somevhat higher level than the natural
Vol. 33, No. 6
level seems sound, though it has little or no known value for adults. The increasing use of sugar is generally regarded as an unwholesome trend. The annual per capita consumption in the United States is now approximately 100 pounds. About one third of this amount seems to be in the form of candies, soft drinks, ice cream, etc., between meals and outside the home. That this practice among children is often responsible for impaired appetites a t mealtime is generally admitted. Its aggregate effect in curtailing a wholesome variety for children must be substantial. There is also considerable evidence, though not a proved case, for the belief that sugar aggravates dental caries. Sugar comprises about 20 per cent of the total calories in the American diet and is almost completely devoid of all vitamins. The deficiency thus created calls for remedial action. However, there is as yet very little evidence to show which vitamins are indigenous t o sugar beet and sugar cane or how much of each. When such data are available, a program of restoration will be in order for consideration. It is doubtful that optimal levels of thiamin in the American dietary can be reached if this large carbohydrate intake is left barren. However, in undertaking restoration of vitamins in sugar, great care will be necessary to avoid still further stimulation of sugar consumption. The use of vitamin content as a basis for the extension of sales of candy and soft drinks should be prevented if possible. The present program for the introduction of enriched flour and bread will afford a splendid opportunity to test the effectiveness of our agencies for popular education. It will be interesting t o observe whether an increased consumption of whole wheat or kindred undermilled cereal products will ensue and how soon. Each industry n-hich undertakes restoration will encounter serious problems of manufacture and control. To ensure uniform distribution of a synthetic vitamin throughout hundreds or thousands of tons of product is no mean task, especially if it must be done dry as in the case of flour. Problems of stability in storage may well arise. In addition, thousands of establishments which have heretofore provided no laboratories for analytical control will be faced with the necessity for a greater or less measure of such control. The problems of each industry will, however, be peculiar to itself and may well be left for discussion by its representatives. I cannot refrain from a note of rejoicing that these years through which we are now passing evidently mark the end of an era in food production. We have become conscious of the tremendous impact which the industrialization and urbanization of our populations have made upon our food supply. Never again can we as a people leave it entirely t o instinctive choice and economic law t o regulate the artificialities introduced by our modern modes of life. Food production is entering upon a new epoch.
