Category: Nutrition

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Varietal diversity in pulse nutritional quality to be documented, maybe even used

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.

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Nibbles: Meta-organic, Wild ginseng, Ancient Australia, Insect nutrition, King Corn, Early nutrition, Funny olives, CWR control, Damn dams

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Ban or breed?

I’m not sure I was aware of the fact that grasspea (khesari dal, or Lathyrus sativus) was actually banned in parts of India due to its toxicity. Devinder Sharma, a food and trade policy analyst, thinks the ban should not be lifted, International Year of Pulses notwithstanding. Instead, alternative crops should be promoted, such as pigeonpea (arhar, or Cajanus cajan). It’s interesting that there’s no Indian grasspea in the genebanks that Genesys knows about (red), ((But then Genesys doesn’t have the data from the Indian genebank. Yet.)) in stark comparison to pigeonpea (blue).

dal

Lathyrism is a problem in situations where grasspea is pretty much the only thing you have to eat. In former times, when famines were more frequent, the ban probably made sense. But is this still the case? And in any case there’s also lots of research going on low-neurotoxin varieties. A ban is hardly likely to provide much of an incentive for such breeding work.