Episode 1: Nutrient deficiency — don't blame your diet

(Lightly edited for readability)

Speakers

A N Ganeshmurthy, Amrita Gupta, Subhra Priyadarshini

00:09 Subhra Priyadarshini: Welcome to the Nature India podcast from New Delhi, India. I am Subhra Priyadarshini. In our first ever episode, we will hear about soil scientist. A N Ganeshmurthy’s research on iron and zinc. Most Indians have micronutrient deficiencies, and he says supplements won't fix the problem, but something else might. Here’s Amrita Gupta with the report.

00:36 Amrita Gupta: Have you taken a look at our supermarket shelves lately? There's fortified salt, fortified sugar, fortified atta, fortified noodles, fortified biscuits, fortified cooking oil. There are whole aisles of multivitamins and nutritional supplements. We've been thinking that this is the solution to our nutritional problems. We need to eat more vitamins and more minerals to be healthier. It's what the media has been telling us and it's what the food companies have been selling us. But what if we were wrong?

01:08 A N Ganeshmurthy: So in my calculation, I have shown the food which we are producing, be it cereals, pulses or fresh fruits and vegetables, or meat to fish, everything -- I have calculated sector wise and then shown that Indian foods are not lacking in terms of this iron and zinc. The problem lies elsewhere. There is no need for us to fortify the food.

01:36 Amrita Gupta: That's A N Ganeshmurthy, a soil scientist. He says that the food we eat supplies us with all the iron and zinc we need. His findings were recently published in the journal Current science. I met with Ganeshmurthy at the Indian Institute of horticultural research in Bangalore. I asked him to tell me more.

01:55 A N Ganeshmurthy: Whenever I was reading about the literature on iron and zinc nutrition and the malnutrition prevailing in this country, every time we feel that people are telling that Indian food is low in nutrient, I was always bothering that this should not happen.

02:17 Amrita Gupta: What he did was calculate the total availability of iron and zinc in different foods in India. Then he looked at the annual needs of the Indian population.

02:26 A N Ganeshmurthy: What is present in today's food is enough to feed our population of 1.3 billion with sufficient mineral nutrition also, that is what I have tried to show.

02:41 Amrita Gupta: But that's a pretty radical idea, especially today where one in every four Indians is hungry. Hidden hunger, the lack of vitamins and minerals is even more prevalent. Globally, India has the highest burden of anemia, and we are among the most zinc deficient people in the world.

03:01 A N Ganeshmurthy: Look, iron and zinc are most essential elements for human growth and development and it is more so in case of infants, adolescent girls, lactating mothers, pregnant women and rapidly growing children. It is very, very important. Iron deficiency leads to anemia. Zinc deficiency leads to two main problems. One is stunted growth, one is improper sexual maturity. Both cause loss of working ability. Working efficiency of individuals is lost because of these two nutrient deficiencies.

03:44 Amrita Gupta: So if we're getting the micronutrients we need, why are we still deficient in them. The problem is that we aren't able to use what we take in.

03:53 A N Ganeshmurthy: Indian food is basically a vegetarian dominant food. In the vegetarian food, like cereals, pulses, oilseeds, all are reaching one anti nutrition compound called phytic acid or phytates. This phytate binds both iron and zinc and even other micronutrients. And it doesn't make it available to the body. It gets just excreted from the body. So that becomes useless.

04:28 Amrita Gupta: Our diet depends on grains and pulses that are rich in phytates. And that's why the bioavailability of iron and zinc is really low. It's less than 10%. In this country. What we're doing is popping more pills. We're fortifying all the food we can. We're breeding new varieties of crops that will take up more nutrients from the soil. Ganeshmurthy is a soil scientist and he's telling us those soils are already depleted. None of this is going to solve the problem. We still can't use all the iron and zinc we are putting inside us.

05:01 A N Ganeshmurthy: That is what the crux of my paper is. By enhancing the amount of nutrient present in the food you are not going to enhance the bioavailability and I have already shown that what is available in today's food is enough if you have ability to absorb it.

05:20 Amrita Gupta: What we should be doing is reducing the phytate content in our food instead. The best part is it's easy to do and it doesn't cost us anything.

05:30 A N Ganeshmurthy: At domestic level you can do it. Simple methods are there, either you ferment it, or sprout it, soak it overnight also, many times it helps.

05:41 Amrita Gupta: It seems too simple to be true. But Ganeshmurthy insists that that's all there is to it.

05:47 A N Ganeshmurthy: There are two typical examples in India. One is the South Indian food habit. One is the northeastern food habit. Both the food habits are dominated by use of fermented foods or sprouts. Both reduce the phytate content and enhance the bioavailability of the nutrients present in the food, like idly and dosa in South India or what we call as kosambari, that is sprouted salad. All these things have very less phytate and enhance the bioavailability of micronutrients.

06:26 Amrita Gupta: It turns out that in these two regions, the South and the Northeast, the prevalence of iron and zinc deficiencies is lower than in the rest of India. There are other ways to reduce phytates and enhance the absorption of micronutrients too. Eating more fruits, especially amla and guava is very effective, he said. Eating raw vegetables increases the amount of iron and zinc that we can absorb as well.

06:51 A N Ganeshmurthy: Even if you increase by 5% or 10% it is enormous. So instead of fortification or through development of a new variety with enhanced level of iron and zinc, better concentrate on increasing the bioavailability.

07:08 Amrita Gupta: And there you have it, a scientist telling us to look to our kitchens and not a lab for an answer. For nature India, this is Amrita Gupta.

07:17 Subhra Priyadarshini: According to this research, you can make zinc and iron more bioavailable by adding more fermented foods to your diet. Ganeshmurthy thinks that might just be one of the solutions to India's nutritional insecurity.

Did you like this episode? Well, if you did, you can subscribe to the Nature India podcast on Soundcloud and iTunes. We will be bringing your exciting new research happening in India or from the huge diaspora Indian science community. For more science news and research highlights from India, you can log on to www.nature.com/natureindia. This is Subhra Priyadarshini for the Nature India podcast.

Never miss an episode: Subscribe to the Nature India Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Acast or your favourite podcast app. Head here for the Nature India Podcast RSS feed.