Anyway I will tell you first how I found out about it. I often read ingredients. And nutritional labels. I am after all very conscious of the nutrition value of the food I eat. Especially now.
In any event, when a product has wheat flour in it, it is typically enriched, typically with B Vitamins and Iron for some reason. Sounds like a good idea.
Then I read the nutritional labels. There is little or none of the vitamins and Iron that they ‘enriched’ it with.
You will understand if I ask ‘why’. Why would they add so little, that it doesn’t even show up as 1% of the daily value?
You might care to ponder on how flour might taste or bake if it contained over 1% metallic iron.
Food is being fortified with trace elements, dietary components which are required in parts per million or parts per billion in a balanced diet. Work out the percentages.
Illustration. The medical condition goitre is primarily of a lack of iodine in the diet. It was essentially eliminated with the use of iodised salt. But people are now favouring non-iodised or pure or boutique salt and using less of it. In Australia there are cases now surfacing in children. It turns out there was a secondary source of iodine. For many years the dairy industry used iodophors as the preferred means to clean and sanitise equipment. They have been banned for a few years now. Iodophors are iodine based and they produced very low level iodine contamination of fresh and processed milk which had the serendipitous benefit of preventing goitre.
I’m holding a bag of enriched flour, and the label says that each serving has 8% of the daily value of iron, and 15% of the daily niacin, and some other stuff too. Maybe you can give us a better example of your question?
Processing a ‘natural’ food may well remove some important minerals and other nutrients. This is particularly important if the food was a good source of a nutrient before processing. For example, by law in the UK, iron, thiamin and niacin must be added back to white and brown flour (but not wholemeal) as they are removed with the bran during the milling of wheat to make all flour (except wholemeal). Folic acid is added to many breakfast cereals.
Removal of those nutrients could also affect taste, so it’s better to add them back in, even if nutritionally they don’t make up a large part of the daily allowance. That said, bread played such an important role in historical diets compared to today that those nutrients added up a lot more than they do now.
There was a scandal in the mid to late 1750s in the UK about adulterants in bread. Things like chalk, bean flower, alum, and even ground up bones were being mixed in with flour to add bulk. Whether intentional or not, mixing alum and chalk (an acid and base respectively) helped leaven the bread, requiring less yeast and mitigating some of the problems of poor wheat harvests. So it’s entirely possible some other enrichment is done more to aid in the production process, and the added nutrients are just a bonus.
IIRC, that’s how they figured out the utility of flouridating water; someone connected the dots that people from certain areas with higher levels of naturally occurring flouride in the water had less tooth decay than people from elsewhere.
Anyway, the point of enriching flour as I understand it isn’t so much to be a primary source of iron/vitamins, but to simply enhance the availability of those nutrients in people’s diets, as they’re things they might be deficient in if they eat a flour-rich diet (like people who ate biscuits and bacon all the time like cowboys).
There was no suggestion that enrichment would create 1% of the total being the enriched elements: as you say, it’s percentages of the daily quota per serving that are being measured on containers.
Give us some examples then. There’s no way for us to guess if you are looking at something that is mainly flour, like bread, or a sauce that has a tiny amount of flour as a thickener.
It gives data on more nutritents, and is for “Doughnuts, cake-type, plain (includes unsugared, old-fashioned)”
NIACIN 2.91 mg 18 % of DV
IRON 2.53 mg 14 % of DV
THIAMIN 0.39 mg 18 % of DV
RIBOFLAVIN 0.301 mg 23 % of DV
FOLIC ACID 76 ug - 20 % of DV (or 7.6 % if you’re a pregnant woman)
Based on the disparities in iron the first one would not be ideal, but it looks like you could still meet your requirements for these nutrients on a all donut diet, which handily disproves the OPs premise.
Well, iron as a fortifier could just be a result of the mill wearing down. How about those other bits? They’re not used to make steel, but is there any possibility that they’re side effects of production, rather than something deliberately added?
No. They are all added do restore nutrients lost when removing the bran and germ, and/or to increase the intake of essential nutrients that our diets are often low in (folic acid to prevent birth defects).
