Fighting Human Malnutrition with Plant Mineral Nutrition.

Fighting Human Malnutrition with Plant Mineral Nutrition

Ismail Cakmak

Sabanci University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, 34956 Istanbul, Turkey

Despite increasing access to adequate amount of food for all, micronutrient deficiencies (“hidden hunger”) still represent a major health problem in human populations, particularly in developing world. Hidden hunger associated commonly with iron, zinc and iodine deficiencies affects around 2 billion people and causes serious health complications and chronic diseases. Major underlying cause of hidden hunger is associated with high consumption of cereal-based foods with very low concentrations of micronutrients. For example; rice, wheat and maize often contain around 10 µg iodine per kg grain that is far too low to meet daily iodine requirement of human populations (i.e., 150 μg per day). Several agricultural strategies are known to improve grain concentrations of micronutrients. As has been demonstrated for zinc, selenium and iodine, maintenance of high pool of micronutrients in the leaf tissue (for example through foliar spray) during the reproductive growth stage is required to achieve desirable concentrations of micronutrients in grains for human nutrition. Field experiments conducted in different countries under the HarvestZinc project (www.harvestzinc.org) on maize, wheat and rice showed that foliar spray of zinc, iodine and selenium in combination or individually resulted in substantial increases in concentrations of those micronutrients, both in whole grain and endosperm part. The foods made by using cereal grains biofortified agronomically with micronutrients, such as bread and cookies, contained also sufficiently high micronutrients indicating higher stability of the micronutrients in end-products. Consuming agronomically-biofortified foods with micronutrients is expected to result in significant contribution to human nutrition with high biological impacts.