Good to see FAO taking the lead in pulling together nutritional data on pulses, in celebration of the International Year of Pulses. Especially since variety-level information will be sought, according to FAO Nutrition Officer Ruth Charrondière .
…if a micronutrient deficiency is identified within a certain region or population, governments and nutritionists can pinpoint the varieties of pulses that contain the highest levels of the micronutrients, and encourage their production on farms and home gardens in these areas. Governments can also use the data to enrich food based dietary guidelines and national food composition tables. Furthermore, researchers and the private sector can use the food composition data to develop new, nutrient-rich varieties of pulses through cross-breeding and selective breeding, and include these improved varieties in mass production programmes.
There is demand for that sort of thing.
Luigi:
The Mumbai Mirror article you link to [There is demand…] speaks to fortification of foods with vitamins and minerals from chemical sources – ala fortification of salt with iodine. They specifically mention fortification of wheat with iron, rice with iron and vit D, and so forth. Pulses are not mentioned directly, though that might be a bean or lentils in the photograph.
Either way, the FAO nutrition database will be useful to allow estimates of baseline vitamins and minerals for the several pulse crops available. If supplemental fortification is deemed necessary there’s no need to overdo it.
More interesting to me, however, is the enhancement of nutritional content through breeding and husbandry efforts. There is plenty of genetic variation for protein and oil content among beans (species of Phaseolus and Glycine); variation for amino acid profile (though aa profile variation is not excessive), and mineral content of grain can be influenced through agronomic practice.
There is demand for biofortified grain, and the FAO database will help set the bar for future effort and hopefully document progress as it’s made.
All very true. I was being kinda sarcastic.
Maybe FAO should be talking to people at CLIMA (Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture) who have a database for that sort of information, especially for germplasm of interest Down Under.