Something i've always wondered about prepared foods....

[MacTech]

Aside from the increase in price, is there a reason why mass produced foods are not vitamin/nutrient enhanced, y’know, any food that didn’t directly come from an animal, prepared stuff, wheter it be luncheon meats, cheeses, chips, snack foods, chocolate, Twinkies, why don’t they come fortified with nutrients?

…and more to the point, would a vitamin fortified Twinkie cause a rupture in the space-time continum and cause a paradox that would destroy all of reality?

so, expense aside, is there a reason prepared foods aren’t vitamin-enhanced?

[ultrafilter]

It’d be more expensive, and they sell pretty well as-is.

[even_sven]

Plenty is…it’s standard for prepared breakfast products (cereal, “bars”) and many kinds of bread. And then there are random enrichments like Vitamin D milk and iodized salt.

But really, few people who eat a varied diet have to worry about vitamin problems.

[dbuzman]

Plus if everything had vitamins added then you might have to worry about getting too much of some vitamins.

[hawthorne]

In this country (Australia), the food authorities have strongly discouraged this practice. As I understand it, they don’t want people to have a good excuse to eat poorly. For stuff like cereals, fortification is done under the banner of replacing the vitamins taken out by processing. It’s all rather baffling.

They have weakened on this in recent times, but here is a relevant excerpt from the policy:

The voluntary addition of vitamins and minerals to food should be permitted only:
Where there is a need for increasing the intake of a vitamin or mineral in one
or more population groups demonstrated by actual clinical or subclinical
evidence of deficiency or by data indicating low levels of intake.
or
Where data indicates that deficiencies in the intake of a vitamin or mineral in
one or more population groups are likely to develop because of changes taking
place in food habits.
or
Where there is generally accepted scientific evidence that an increase in the
intake of a vitamin and/or mineral can deliver a health benefit.
or
To enable the nutritional profile of foods to be maintained at pre-processing
levels as far as possible after processing (through modified restoration2).
or
To enable the nutritional profile of specific substitute foods to be aligned with
the primary food (through nutritional equivalence).
• The permitted fortification has the potential to address the deficit or deliver the
benefit to a population group that consumes the fortified food according to its
reasonable intended use.
• Permission to fortify should not promote consumption patterns inconsistent with the
nutrition policies and guidelines of Australia and New Zealand.
• Permission to fortify should not promote increased consumption of foods high in salt,
sugar or fat.
• Fortification will not be permitted in alcoholic beverages.
• Permissions to fortify should ensure that the added vitamins and minerals are present
in the food at levels which will not have the potential to result in detrimental excesses
or imbalances of vitamins and minerals in the context of total intake across the
general population.
• The fortification of a food, and the amounts of fortificant in the food, should not mislead the consumer as to the nutritional quality of the fortified food.

(from here (.pdf))