Thursday, March 27, 2008

Nutrification

Enriching or fortifying foods with nutrients is called nutrification. Food enrichment is the restoration of the natural nutritive value of a food before it was processed, while fortification is the adding of vitamins or minerals to a food at levels higher than it originally possessed, though "fortification" is commonly used to refer to both processes.

Functional foods, designer foods, and techno-foods, are foods that are manufactured by food companies in collaboration with sellers of dietary supplements, in order to produce products that they can promote as healthy. Techno-foods “refer to foods and beverages that have been fortified in some way to confer health benefits beyond the original nutritional value of the foods themselves."
Initially, fortification was used as a public health strategy in the United States to eradicate vitamin and mineral deficiencies. For example, through the addition of iodine to table salt, goiter, a thyroid gland dysfunction, is now very uncommon. Other examples include the addition of vitamin D to milk and fluoride to tap water.

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