New-wave fortification

Amid all the furore over the sugar and salt content of our breakfast bowls, Professor Tom Sanders, head of nutrition at King’s College London, thinks we’re missing the point. According to Sanders, children get roughly 20-25% of their daily micronutrient intake from a bowl of cereal in the morning, plus what may be the only milk they drink all day.

“It’s unfortunate that food lobbyists have latched on to cereals and are trying to say they’re like eating a packet of biscuits,” he says. “I’m very pragmatic and if the kids are getting healthier it’s OK. Most are taller and in better shape than they used to be. It’s true that some are overweight, but the main problem is in groups where they’re more likely to be eating snacks on the way to school rather than sitting down to breakfast.”

If Sanders is right, it’s not just bad news for cereal manufacturers that a recent report from Datamonitor showed that people are continuing to abandon breakfast in favour of on-the-go snacks. In 2004, the average British consumer missed 114 breakfasts a year, and that’s forecast to grow to 120 in 2009. Their European counterparts fared a little better, missing just 72 breakfasts a year in 2004.

Cereal manufacturers have been responding by promoting the health benefits of breakfast. For example, Nestlé’s recent high-profile campaign uses green-topped packaging to highlight the benefits of eating its wholegrain products. The past few years have also seen the introduction of portable counterparts to ready-to-eat (RTE) cereal brands in the form of cereal bars. But future big promotions may well return to a subject that cereal manufacturers probably understand better than anyone - fortification.

Compared with most producers of functional foods, cereal manufacturers are old hands at boosting the content of healthy ingredients in their products. Fortification with minerals such as iron and calcium has been instrumental in slashing the health problems associated with nutritional deficiencies. Still, some people argue that fortification discourages people from adopting healthier eating habits. “It’s a bit like the argument about using artificial sweeteners in beverages. The purists tell us we should all be drinking water instead, but I think it’s good if people are making healthier choices,” says Sanders.

But with the classic nutrient deficiency diseases such as anaemia (iron), goiter (iodine) and rickets (vitamin D) largely defeated in the developed world, the emphasis of fortification is shifting towards other aspects of health and well-being.

Kellogg is ahead of the game in the UK in seeking to launch products fortified with ‘new wave’ ingredients. Not only was it the first to launch a cereal in the UK fortified with the prebiotic inulin, but it has also signed a deal to buy the omega-3 oil, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with a view to developing products offering DHA’s cardiovascular protection and brain boosting power.

Inulin is a carbohydrate belonging to a class of compounds known as fructans. Because it resists digestion in the upper gastrointestinal tract it reaches the large intestine essentially intact, where it is fermented by indigenous bacteria. This promotes gut health by encouraging the growth of beneficial bacteria. Secondly, inulin’s resistance to digestion helps lower the glycaemic index (GI) of food. Kellogg initially launched its inulin-fortified cereal as Muddles, but subsequently renamed it Rice Krispies Multi-Grain.

“I think we will see more products following this lead, particularly in the light of the low-GI properties which prebiotic fibres generally infer,” says Stephanie French of Harlequin Plus, a nutrition strategy consultant to the food industry. “Consumer understanding of the product proposition is still weak but the interest in improved immune function [by boosting beneficial gut organisms] is one that I think will grow.”

Benefits of lower GI dietsFrench says that the evidence to support the benefit of lower-GI diets is still being established: “While further research is still required on the links between low GI diets and obesity, what is clear is that they reduce glucose peaks and therefore provide a more sustained source of energy than higher GI foods.”

Ram Chaudhery, chief scientific officer for US-based fortification company Fortitech, expects cereals fortified with inulin or similar fibres to start hitting the market thick and fast in the near future: “There’s a lot of development going on. We’ve noticed a real upsurge in interest in the past few months.”

Earlier this year, Kellogg also revealed that it may add DHA to products when it signed a deal with US-based DHA supplier Martek. The companies are keeping details of any new products strictly under wraps, but Ruben Abril of Martek says there are no ‘ready-to-eat’ cereals offering DHA on the market yet, so Kellogg looks to be ahead of the game once again.

Omega-3s are well-established in the public consciousness as being healthy. What is less widely understood is that long-chain DHA and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) from marine sources are the only omega-3s known to provide cardiovascular benefits and DHA alone is the only omega-3 known to boost brain development and function.

Fortitech supplies an enormous range of fortification ingredients world wide, including DHA.

According to Chaudhery, there are two obstacles to putting DHA in breakfast cereals - flavour and stability. Most DHA is from a fish source and that can have obvious taste implications: “You can mask it up to a point, but it depends on the level of fortification you want.” The long-chain molecules that make up DHA can also be compromised during the high-temperature, high-pressure processes that many cereals undergo.

“We don’t currently market DHA for high-temperature processing,” he says. “It’s feasible, but at what cost and can you add it at the level you need to gain a nutritional benefit?”

MicroencapsulationChaudhery says that microencapsulation is the way for DHA to tackle both problems and Fortitech is currently running pilot trials.Martek’s DHA is derived from marine algae, so it doesn’t suffer from the same flavour issues as fish-derived versions. But Abril admits there are processing and shelf-life concerns to overcome. “In order to overcome these two challenges, we need to resort to an oil that is microencapsulated and has some resistance to water, in other words that shows some water insolubility,” he says.

Australian-based DHA supplier Nu-Mega, believes it has perfected microencapsulation for its tuna-based oil. Nu-Mega has the first DHA-fortified cereal bar on the UK market through a company called Next Level Healthcare of Bradford. The Brainstorm bar offers 130mg of DHA in a 45g bar and Jerry Luff, Nu-Mega’s executive vice president of business development, Europe, claims there is no compromise on taste. He says that the bar is being introduced by Waitrose, Boots, Superdrug and Holland and Barratt, with Sainsbury and Tesco set to follow later in the year.

“The technology itself is a sensitive area, but we basically take a dairy protein and carbohydrate and form a slurry with the refined tuna oil. We then spray dry it,” he explains. The resulting powder is tough enough to withstand normal processing and does not require special handling. “Microencapsulation protects both ways. There is no fish flavour and the product is mechanically and temperature stable,” says Luff.

The encapsulated material is designed not to release the oil until it’s in the lower gut. According to Luff, this ensures high bioavailability and, unlike softgel capsules, there should be no chance of a fish flavour “repeating” on consumers. Tuna oil is highly oxidative but microencapsulation retards the process. “We’re looking at a timeframe of two years so the shelf-life characteristics of the end products are very good,” he says.

Phytosterols and antixoxidants Cholesterol-lowering phytosterols are another relatively recent fortification ingredient, and Chaudhery says that the technology is now developing to be able to add them to cereals rather than just the yoghurts and spreads they are typically found in today.

“The problem has been that these are oil-soluble materials, but ester forms are being developed that will make them more water-soluble.” Antioxidants such as lutein (found in eggs and green vegetables) and lycopene (from tomatoes) are also set to start making an appearance on cereal packets. As well as providing the general protection claimed for antioxidants against diseases such as cancer, these carotenoids are believed to promote good vision into old age by guarding against degeneration of the retina.

New fortification ingredients look set for a boom, but Chaudhery cautions that formulating cereals with increasingly complex combinations of nutrients is no easy business. “You can’t just add everything at once because there may be interactions that affect the taste, texture, colour or bioavailability.”

This is where an all-round fortification company, rather than a single ingredient supplier, may have the advantage.

“Fortitech can run experiments to find the best approach,” he says. FM