Low-fat and fat-free foods are gaining popularity lately. Although restricting the amount of fat in the diet is good for health, paradoxically, it also results in loss of fat soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids leading to a myriad of deficiencies. The challenge then becomes the addition of fat soluble nutrients to such fat-free or low-fat foods to make up for these deficiencies.
Scientists at the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, Haryana have come up with a method to enhance the nutritional content of fat-free milk by preparing Vitamin-A and Milk Protein complexes.
Vitamin-A is one of the four fat-soluble essential vitamins, the others being D, E and K. The deficiency of Vitamin-A, which is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness is a major public health problem in India.
Dr. Arora and his team of researchers modified casein, the major protein present in milk, with a chemical called succinic anhydride (SA) and prepared succinylated casein- Vit A complexes. They tried different combinations and found sodium caseinate-Vit A and succinylated sodium caseinate-Vit A complexes had high Vitamin-A binding ability and solubility.
SA is classified under the ‘generally recognized as safe (GRAS)’ category by the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) thus modifications of casein using SA are considered safe for human consumption.
They suggest that casein owing to its unique properties can be easily used as a delivery vehicle for Vitamin-A in milk.
“FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India) has approved the addition of vitamins A and D to milk. These vitamins are being used for fortifying milk by Mother Dairy, Amul and many state cooperatives at the moment”, Dr. Arora commented. He further added, “addition of minerals would be the next step”. He assures us that such fortified foods are no longer a fantasy and that these improvements will be done incrementally.
Such strategies involving the fortification of staple foods like milk, rice, salt, etc. are the most important tools in India’s arsenal for the fight against malnutrition.
The team led by Dr. Sumit Arora included Chitra Gupta, M.A. Syama and Apurva Sharma at the Dairy Chemistry Division, National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, Haryana. This work was published in the journal Food Chemistry and was financially supported by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India.