Vitamin A deficiency is the most common cause of blindness in the world, and in extreme situations, it can be deadly. This vitamin deficiency affects about one-third of all preschool-aged children around the world. It is most common in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Now, scientists at MIT have found a new way to add vitamin A to foods. They hope that this could help improve the health of millions of people all over the world. They demonstrated in recent research that protecting vitamin A in a polymer protects the substance from being destroyed during cooking or storage.
Ana Jaklenec, a research scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, says, “Vitamin A is a very important micronutrient, but it’s a very unstable molecule.”
As the authors put it, “we wanted to see if our encapsulated vitamin A could fortify a food vehicle like bouillon cubes or flour, throughout storage and cooking, and whether the vitamin A could remain biologically active and be absorbed.”
In a small clinical trial, researchers found that the bioavailability of vitamin A in bread with encapsulated vitamin A was the same as when people ate vitamin A on its own. Two companies have been given the rights to use the technology in food products.
“This is a study that our team is really excited about because it shows that everything we did in test tubes and animals works safely and effectively in humans,” adds Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute. “We hope this opens the door for someday helping millions, if not billions, of people in the developing world.”
The main authors of the new study are Jaklenec and Langer. It will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wen Tang, a former MIT postdoc and current associate professor at South China University of Technology, is the paper’s primary author.
As well as being essential for healthy eyesight, vitamin A is also important for maintaining healthy skin, hair, nails, bones, cartilage, mucous membranes, and even the heart and lungs. People in West African countries eat a lot of bread and other foods like bouillon cubes, but most attempts to add vitamin A to these foods have failed because the vitamin breaks down when stored or cooked.
The MIT researchers demonstrated in a 2019 study that they could encapsulate minerals such as iron, vitamin A, and numerous others using a polymer called BMC. They demonstrated that those who ate bread enhanced with encapsulated iron absorbed the iron and that the protective covering extended the shelf life of the nutrients.
BMC is “generally regarded as safe” by the FDA, and it is already used to coat drugs and dietary supplements. The goal of the current study was to employ this polymer to encapsulate vitamin A, a substance that is very sensitive to heat and UV radiation.
The researchers combined vitamin A with the polymer to create particles that were 100 to 200 microns in diameter using an industrial procedure called a spinning disc technique. Starch was also applied to the particles to prevent them from adhering to one another.
Researchers found that intense light, high temperatures, or boiling water were less likely to break down vitamin A when it was wrapped in polymer particles. When vitamin A was supplied as VitA 250, the most stable form of vitamin A presently utilized for food fortification, or when it was free, substantially more of the vitamin remained active under those circumstances.
The researchers also demonstrated how simple it was to integrate the encapsulated particles into flour or bouillon cubes. The cubes were subjected to extreme circumstances, as advised by the World Health Organization: 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and 75 percent humidity, to see how well they would withstand long-term preservation. The encapsulated vitamin A was much more stable than other forms of vitamin A in such circumstances.
“The enhanced stability of vitamin A with our technology can ensure that the vitamin A-fortified food does provide the recommended daily uptake of vitamin A, even after long-term storage in a hot humidified environment, and cooking processes such as boiling or baking,” Tang adds. “People who are suffering from vitamin A deficiency and want to get vitamin A through fortified food will benefit, without changing their daily routines, and without wondering how much vitamin A is still in the food.”
When the researchers cooked their encapsulated particles and offered them to animals, they discovered that 30% of the vitamin A was absorbed, the same as free uncooked vitamin A, compared to roughly 3% of free cooked vitamin A.
The researchers then conducted tests in collaboration with Biofortis, a business that specializes in dietary clinical research, to see how well individuals absorbed vitamin A from meals that had been supplemented with the particles. In order to conduct this study, the scientists mixed the particles into bread. Then, 24 hours after bread consumption, they assessed blood levels of vitamin A. They discovered that vitamin A, which is quickly released in bioactive form, was absorbed from meals at amounts equivalent to free vitamin A when it was encapsulated in the BMC polymer.
Source: 10.1073/pnas.2211534119
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