vitamin A defficiency

 A lack of vitamin A may be prevented by microparticles.

Millions of people could benefit from food fortification with new polymer particles containing vitamin A by improving their vision and general health.

The most common cause of blindness in the world is vitamin A deficiency, which in extreme circumstances can be lethal. This vitamin insufficiency, which is particularly common in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, affects roughly one-third of the world's preschool-aged population.

In order to promote the health of millions of people worldwide, MIT researchers have created a novel method of adding vitamin A to foods. A recent study demonstrated that protecting vitamin A in a polymer helps to prevent the substance from being destroyed during cooking or storage.

According to Ana Jaklenec, a research scientist at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, "Vitamin A is a highly critical vitamin, but it's a fragile chemical." We sought to determine whether our encapsulated vitamin A could strengthen a food carrier, such as bouillon cubes or flour, throughout storage and cooking as well as whether the vitamin A could be biologically active and be absorbed.

In a brief clinical experiment, the researchers found that the bioavailability of the nutrient was comparable when patients received vitamin A alone or bread enhanced with encapsulated vitamin A. Two businesses have been granted licences to the technology in order to develop it for application in food products.

Stability of nutrients

The immune system, as well as organs like the heart and lungs, depend on vitamin A for proper operation. Vitamin A is also essential for vision. The vitamin degrades during storage or cooking, therefore efforts to add vitamin A to bread or other foods like bouillon cubes, which are frequently consumed in West African countries, have mostly been fruitless.

In a paper published in 2019, the MIT team demonstrated that they could employ a polymer known as BMC to encapsulate nutrients including iron, vitamin A, and a number of others. They demonstrated that this protective coating increased the nutrients' shelf life and that encapsulated iron could be absorbed by those who ate bread supplemented with the vitamin.

The researchers combined vitamin A with the polymer to create particles that were 100 to 200 microns in diameter using an industrial procedure called a spinning disc technique. Starch was also applied to the particles to prevent them from adhering to one another.

The scientists discovered that vitamin A that was enclosed within polymer particles was more resistant to being destroyed by harsh light, extreme temperatures, or boiling water. When vitamin A was supplied as VitA 250, the most stable form of vitamin A currently utilised for food fortification, or when it was free, substantially more of the vitamin remained active under those circumstances.

According to Tang, even after prolonged storage in a hot, humid atmosphere and cooking operations like boiling or baking, the vitamin A-fortified food will still supply the needed daily intake of vitamin A thanks to the technology's improved stability of the vitamin. Without altering their daily routines or worrying about how much vitamin A is still in the food, people who are deficient in vitamin A and want to supplement their diet with fortified foods will benefit.

vitamin ingestion

The amount of vitamin A that was absorbed when the researchers cooked their encapsulated particles and then gave them to animals was found to be 30%, the same as free, uncooked vitamin A, as opposed to about 3 percent of free, cooked vitamin A.

The researchers next assessed how efficiently vitamin A was absorbed in persons who consumed foods supplemented with the particles, working with Biofortis, a business that conducts nutritional clinical testing. In order to conduct this study, the scientists mixed the particles into bread. Then, 24 hours after bread consumption, they assessed blood levels of vitamin A. They discovered that vitamin A was absorbed from meals at amounts comparable to free vitamin A when it was encapsulated in the BMC polymer.