Ashoka - Nutrients for All - Globaliser Summit 2013

1. The Challenge of Form
Ashoka
Nutrients for All
Globaliser Summit
Frankfurt – June 2013

2. Hidden Hunger affects more than two
billion people. Even when a person
consumes adequate calories and protein, if
they lack one single micronutrient - or a
combination of vitamins and minerals -
their immune system is compromised, and
infections take hold.
World Hunger Series 2007 - Hunger and Health
World Food Programme

3. Nutrients
 The human body needs sufficient
nutrients for optimum health
 On a daily basis, we require
 17 minerals
 14 vitamins
 9 amino acids
 2 fatty acids

4. But modern farming methods have
conspired to maximise yield at the
expense of nutrient content:
 Deep ploughing
 NPK fertilisers
 Pesticides & Fungicides
 Monoculture
 GM crops
 Hydroponics
 Early harvesting & Artificial ripening
 Factory farming
 Storage & Transport

5. Today, our food contains a fraction
of the essential micronutrients it
contained 100 years ago
And the Food Industry has compounded
this problem by:
 Refining
 Milling
 Processing
 Additives
 Extensive use of sugar, high fructose corn
syrup and hydrogenated oils (trans fats)

6. Influence of Milling on Vitamin &
Mineral Content of Maize
Wholegrain Milled % Loss
(μg/g) (μg/g)
Vitamin A 0 0 0
Vitamin B1 - Thiamine 4.7 1.3 72.3
Vitamin B2 - Riboflavine 0.9 0.4 55.6
Vitamin B3 - Niacin 16.2 9.8 39.5
Vitamin B6 - Pyridoxine 5.4 1.9 64.8
Vitamin E 0 0 0
Folate 0.3 0.1 66.7
Biotin 0.073 0.014 80.8
Calcium 30.8 14.5 52.9
Phosphorus 3100 800 74.2
Zinc 21 4.4 79.0
Iron 23.3 10.8 53.6

7. Feeding People what Rodents Reject
Sammy eats the maize germ, where the cereal fat
and micronutrients are found.
Human beings refine out the nutrient-rich maize
germ and eat the sterile remains.

8. Hidden Hunger
 In Southern Africa today, the staples are:
 Refined maize meal (empty calories)
 Bread (mostly refined)
 White sugar (empty calories)
 Soft drinks
 Sweets
 Most processed foods
 Traditional margarine (trans fats)
 Cooking oil

10. In the Third World, fortification of
depleted staple foods has become
commonplace:
 Interventions are based on a belief that we
can get essential micronutrients from
chemicals added to our food, but:
 They are often toxic
 They are often poorly absorbed (low bioavailability)
 They use different metabolic pathways
 They rarely act in the body in the way intended (low
bioefficacy)
 With the exceptions of iodine and folic acid,
this hope has not been realised

11. The South African Experience
 The National Food Consumption Survey (1999)
showed that South Africans were deficient in iron,
zinc, vitamin A and most of the B vitamins
 After 5 years of mandatory wheat and maize flour
fortification, the National Food Consumption Survey
(2005) - Published 2008 – showed:
 The prevalence of poor vitamin A status in children had
increased
 The prevalence of poor iron status in children had
increased
 Almost one third of women and children were
anaemic
 A high prevalence of poor zinc status among children

12. Why Fortification Fails
 The iron salts used have a bioavailability of less
than 2%
 Iron and zinc salts compete for absorption sites
 Phytic acid in grain blocks the absorption of iron,
zinc, calcium and magnesium
 Iron salts oxidise the vitamin A
 The vitamins are destroyed by cooking
 The RDAs are based on adult, not child food
portions – which reduces the intake for the most
vulnerable

14. What About Sprinkles?
 Nepal Study (2009) – 8500 children – no control
group. After 6 months of intervention:
 Nutritional status had deteriorated
 Prevalence of anaemia (c.43%) remained unchanged
 Pakistan Study (2013) – 2746 children – Cluster
RCT. After 12 months of intervention:
 Haemoglobin improved marginally, but all remained
anaemic
 Serum zinc and retinol showed little change
 The improved growth in one group was paltry
 Side effects were serious (diarrhoea and respiratory)
and militated against any benefit

15. So What is Going Wrong?
 It is generally believed that all
vitamins and minerals come from
food
 And many health professionals
believe that different forms of
vitamins and minerals are the same
 But, both beliefs are wrong!

16. Nutrient Form
 Food
 The ideal, but our food is depleted of nutrients
 Food Form
 Food State or Re-Natured are vitamins and
minerals in a form as close as possible to food
 Amino Acid Chelates are minerals in a form
that the body accepts as food
 High bioefficacy and non-toxic
 Isolates
 Vitamins and minerals that are synthesised in
the laboratory
 Bioefficacy is low
 The vitamins are notoriously unstable

17. Vitamin C
 In the 1930s, Szent-Györgyi was awarded the
Nobel Prize for the discovery of Vitamin C
 He demonstrated that the active material in
paprika was ascorbic acid
 When, with repeated distillation, he extracted
crystalline ascorbic acid, he expected a strong
reaction
 But it did nothing - the concentrated whole foods
he had used in his research were far more effective
 Furthermore, ascorbic acid is excreted within 2
hours of ingestion, whilst vitamin C in a food form
is retained for 48 hours or longer

18. Forms of Selenium
Form IC50
Selenium Yeast 3.0 μM
Selenomethionine 52.8 μM
Blank Yeast > 100 μM (Not an Antioxidant)
Sodium Selenite > 1000 μM (Not an Antioxidant)
Inhibition Of LDL+VLDL Oxidation
By Different Forms of Selenium
Selenium is an important antioxidant. Where there
is deficiency, it has become commonplace to fortify
bread or salt with sodium selenate or selenite

19. Calcium
 Elephants - their skeletons are maintained
with the Calcium they get each day from
leaves and grass
 Pettifor showed that 30mg of Calcium in
Calcium-rich yeast is better absorbed than
300mg of Calcium Carbonate
 The former went to bone; the latter to
kidney
 Apparently, we are not designed to eat
chalk!

20. Comparing the Bioefficacy of Combined
Vitamin & Mineral Supplements

21. Abundant Evidence
 In 1999, Nobel Prize winner, Günter Blobel,
demonstrated that for vitamins and minerals to be
effectively absorbed into cells, they needed to be
associated with their plant carrier proteins.
 Recent work shows that USP vitamins and inorganic
minerals are sub-optimal delivery systems for the
micronutrients we need.
Dr Paul Clayton
 Isolating nutrients and trying to get benefits equal to
those of whole foods reveals an ignorance of how
nutrition works in the body. Relying on the use of
isolated nutrients to maintain health is not only a
waste of money, but potentially dangerous.
Prof T Colin Campbell
The China Study - 2005

22. A Call to Action
 Remunerate producers on the nutritional content of the
food they produce
 Stop refining grain
 Stop believing that we can correct micronutrient
deficiencies by adding these to food in the form of chemical
isolates
 In the face of repeated failure, we should be conducting
robust research
 And we need to question the validity of the RCT in nutrition
research
 Stop feeding hungry children in the Third World with CSB
(refined cereal) or Plumpy’Nut (high fat, high sugar)
 Stop using BMI as a measure of nutritional status, unless
we believe that fat kids are healthy kids

23. Thank You for Your Interest
Health Empowerment Through Nutrition is a
UK Registered Charity concerned with the
alleviation of Hidden Hunger
www.hetn.org