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Nutrition, Value & Choice

 

Nutrition, Value & Choice

Research in agricultural biotechnology has helped produce more nutritious and healthful foods. Biotech experts develop crops with enhanced nutrition profiles that address vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and improve food and crop oil content, which can aid in cardiovascular health.

 

Enhancing Nutrition in Developing Countries

Using biotechnology, food manufacturers fortify crops for the developing world with the nutrients that their diets typically lack. For example, to prevent blindness caused by Vitamin A deficiencies, biotech processes enrich staple crops like rice and potatoes with β-carotene (provitamin A). By increasing iron in staple crops like rice, biotechnology could help prevent anemia, which currently affects two billion people worldwide.

 

Fighting Obesity

Fats and oils are an essential part of the human diet, but in the developed world, we consume far too many of them. Over-consumption of the wrong types of fats and oils has caused an epidemic of obesity, chronic disease and disability. By changing the amount of “bad” fats in foods or by producing “good” fats in greater volumes, biotechnology makes foods healthier.