Adding Micronutrients To Food Would Be Highly Cost-Effective Form Of Foreign Aid, New York Times Columnist Writes

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"As the United States reorganizes its chaotic aid program, it might try promoting what just may be the world's most luscious food: micronutrients," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. Micronutrients -- such as folic acid, iodine, zinc, iron and vitamin A -- are "lifesaving for children and for women who may become pregnant," and "there's scarcely a form of foreign aid more cost effective than getting them into the food supply," Kristof adds.

Deficiencies of micronutrients, particularly folic acid, in pregnant women can lead to neural tube defects and other deformities in their infants, Kristof writes. Iodine deficiency leads to "malformation of fetuses' brains, so they have 10 to 15 points permanently shaved off their I.Q.'s," he says, adding, "Then there's zinc, which reduces child deaths from diarrhea and infections." In addition, a lack of iron "causes widespread anemia," while "some 670,000 children die each year because they don't get enough vitamin A, and lack of the vitamin remains the world's leading cause of childhood blindness," according to Kristof.

"The most cost-effective way to distribute micronutrients isn't to hand them out" because "impoverished women can be hard to reach, and even if they are given folic acid pills, they sometimes won't take them for fear that they actually are birth control pills," he continues. "So micronutrients instead are often added to such common foods as salt, sugar, flour or cooking oil," Kristof writes, adding that supplementing food with micronutrients costs "about 30 cents per person reached per year" (Kristof, New York Times, 1/3).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women's Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families, published by The Advisory Board Company.

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