In her small kitchen, Idowu Bello looks over a gas cooker while stirring a pot of eba, the thick West African food made from cassava root. Kidney problems and chronic exhaustion forced the 56-year-old Nigerian woman to retire from teaching.
Lack of money limits the food Bello has. But doctors have told her to eat a nutrient-rich diet to improve her health and to help her teenage daughter, Fatima, grow.
“Fish, meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables and even milk are costly these days,” Bello said.
But if public health experts and the Nigerian government have their way, Bello and others will soon have a simple ingredient they can use to improve their nutrition.
Government officials recently announced rules for adding iron, zinc, folic acid and vitamin B12 to bouillon cubes. The cubes are made from dried meat and vegetables and spices. People usually use them to add taste to soups and stews.
Manufacturers do not yet have to add the four vitamins and minerals to their cubes. But if they choose to add them, the new rules state how they must include them.
The use of fortified cubes could help speed up efforts to improve diets lacking necessary micronutrients such as zinc and iron. Public health officials call the lack of such micronutrients “hidden hunger”.
A new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation states that fortified cubes could help prevent up to 16.6 million cases of anemia and up to 11,000 deaths from neural tube defects in Nigeria. Many Nigerian children are also growing less during childhood because of lack of nutrition.
“Everyone uses seasoning cubes,” Bello said as she dropped one in her soup.
A recent Nigerian government study estimated that 79 percent of Nigerian households are food insecure. Extreme heat and changes in rainfall have hurt farming in Nigeria and other countries near the southern part of the Saharan desert.
Helen Keller International (HKI) is a New York-based nonprofit that works to solve problems caused by blindness and malnutrition. It has partnered with the Gates Foundation, businesses and government agencies in Africa to support food fortification.
Augustine Okoruwa is a nutrition expert at HKI. He said the destruction of farmland has caused food prices to increase. That has made it more difficult for people to get animal-based protein into their diet.
In Nigeria, recent economic policies such as the cancellation of gasoline subsidies are driving the country’s worst cost-of-living crisis in many years. It has become even more difficult for low-earning Nigerians to pay for the food they need.
Around the world, nearly 3 billion people are unable to get enough healthy food. More than 70 percent of them live in developing countries, the World Health Organization says.
The Gates Foundation said that greatly increasing fortified foods would offer a new way to increase micronutrients in foods that people commonly eat in low-income countries.
A study by HKI notes that bouillon cubes are used in nearly every household in countries like Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon. That makes the cubes the “most cost-effective way” to add minerals and vitamins to the diets of millions of people, Okoruwa said.
No Nigerian manufacturers already include the four micronutrients at the amounts stated by the new rules. However, the food industry is showing interest.
Sweet Nutrition, based in Ota, started adding iron to some of its products in 2017. Marketing manager Roop Kumar told The Associated Press that the move was meant to support public health.
Kumar added that the company is testing plans for more fortification with the launch of the new rules.
Okoruwa of HKI said one problem with marketing fortified foods is that many people have received false information about them.
Yunusa Mohammed is the head of the food group at the Standards Organization of Nigeria, the government agency that sets rules for many products people buy. He said educating people about the benefits of fortified products may help push back against the misinformation. He added that there is a need to keep the cost of fortified foods low.
Food fortification is not new in Nigeria. Most of the salt in the country contains iodine. And products such as wheat flour, cooking oil and sugar are fortified with vitamin A by law. But the rule for adding the four vitamins and minerals to bouillon marks the biggest step in fortification.
Company officials, government agencies, research groups and development organizations are working together to support putting the micronutrients in cubes.
I’m Andrew Smith. And I’m Caty Weaver.
