Pearl millet can meet iron needs of children: study
Karachi : August 18: A study just published in the Journal of Nutrition shows that bread made of pearl millet (a variety of bajra) can provide young children with their full daily iron needs. But a Pakistani scientist and a paediatrician differ.
Pearl millet is an important staple food in semi-arid regions of India and Africa, where iron deficiency is widespread. Lack of iron impairs mental development and increases fatigue. Severe anemia, often caused by iron deficiency, increases the risk of women dying in childbirth. These new varieties of pearl millet are being conventionally bred to provide more dietary iron to rural farming communities in arid drought-prone regions where few other crops thrive.
The people of Pakistan’s serene desert Tharparkar, it seems, can benefit immensely from the findings.
“In Pakistan pearl millet is not popular. However, another crop named Sorghum that is also among the less cultivated crops can be easily cultivated in all climatic conditions and in different soils across the country. “Sorghum has many varieties but two varieties namely Sweet Sorghum and White Sorghum have great potential as a source of sugar and starch. Its fertilizer requirement is nominal and can be exploited as a cheap source of industrial starches and for food and feed purposes,” said the chairman of the Department of Food Science & Technology, University of Karachi, Prof Dr Abid Hasnain, said in response to a query from The News.
In the study, iron-deficient Indian children under the age of three who ate traditionally-prepared porridges (sheera, uppama) and flat bread (roti) made from iron-rich pearl millet flour absorbed substantially more iron than from ordinary pearl millet flour, enough to meet their physiological requirements. As an added bonus, this iron-rich pearl millet also contained more zinc, which was similarly absorbed in sufficient amounts and meet the children’s full daily zinc needs. Lack of zinc in children can lead to stunting and impaired immune response against common infections.
According to Dr Michael Hambidge, Pediatrics Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado in Denver, who led the research team, the findings represent a promising development for public health. “In the areas where pearl millet is the main food staple, this study offers a serious, potentially important, strategy to battle malnutrition,” he says.
But the chairperson of the Department of Pediatrics at the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS), Prof Dr Aisha Mehnaz, differed though she agreed that the study seemed to be promising.
Responding to a query by The News, she said: “Millet and rice is not a staple diet in Pakistan and our main diet is wheat. What we need is fortified wheat which takes into consideration our essential micronutrients’ deficiency.
“One has to keep in mind that both wheat and millet cannot be taken by a person who is suffering from coeliac disease which is a disease in which a person develops hypersensitivity to gluten present in wheat, rye etc. Coeliac disease is common in our country. Although the study seems to be promising we need to look with other sources of food iron which is cheap and easily available.”
The principal investigator on the India research team, Dr Bhalchandra Kodkany of Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, an expert on maternal and child health and practising obstetrician and gynecologist, says that most of the pregnant women who come to his clinic have very low levels of iron in their blood.
“We often see cases of severe anemia in women and school children in India because they mostly eat wheat and rice based foods which are very deficient in iron,” he notes. “So, these results are very welcome news for India.”
Nutritionists have welcomed these new findings. “Globally, women and children are the two groups who suffer the most from mineral deficiencies,” explains Dr Erick Boy, head of Nutrition at HarvestPlus, a global programme to improve nutrition. “Until now, we believed that cereal grains could not supply enough iron or zinc to meet the nutritional needs of these vulnerable groups. These findings, from two different parts of the world, have established that iron-rich pearl millet can be an excellent source of iron and even zinc, much more so than wheat and rice.”
Iron-rich pearl millet is being developed using conventional breeding by the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) as part of the HarvestPlus programme.
The first iron-rich pearl millet variety (ICTP-8203Fe) was commercialised in 2012 in Maharashtra, India. It also provides more zinc, is high yielding and is disease and drought tolerant. Results from this study indicate that children could get their full daily iron needs from just 100 grams of this pearl millet flour. Children aged under two, who might eat less, would still benefit substantially from eating iron-rich pearl millet.The news.
