fortified food
Meaning of fortified food: Food carrying nutrients it never contained naturally, added deliberately to reach a whole population through the shopping basket.
Definition of fortified food
A fortified food is one to which vitamins or minerals have been added that it did not originally contain, or contained only in trivial amounts. Salt with iodine, milk with vitamin D and flour with folic acid are the standard examples. The aim is usually a public health one: raising intake of a nutrient across a population by adding it to something people already eat.
How is it different from an enriched food?
The two words are swapped freely in conversation and mean different things on a label. Enrichment puts back what processing removed, so refined flour has B vitamins and iron returned to it after milling has stripped them out of the grain. Fortification adds something never present in any useful quantity, which is what putting iodine into salt or vitamin D into milk achieves. An enriched food is therefore restoring the original rather than improving on it, and although every enriched food is fortified in the loosest sense, the reverse does not hold.
Why is it done at all?
Because it reaches people who are not looking for it. A supplement helps only those who buy one and remember to take it, a group that tends to exclude exactly those whose intake is lowest. Adding a nutrient to a staple food reaches everyone eating that staple, at very small cost per person and with no change in behavior required. The near disappearance of iodine deficiency where salt is iodized, and the fall in neural tube defects where flour carries folic acid, are the clearest results of the approach. The trade-off is individual choice, since anyone eating the staple receives the addition whether they want it or not, which is why the decision sits with regulators rather than with manufacturers.
What is added, and to what?
| Nutrient | Common carrier | Problem addressed |
|---|---|---|
| Iodine | Table salt | Goiter and impaired brain development |
| Vitamin D | Milk, margarine, breakfast cereals | Rickets and weakened bone |
| Folic acid | Flour and cereal grains | Neural tube defects in early pregnancy |
| Iron | Flour and infant cereal | Iron deficiency anemia |
| Vitamin A | Cooking oil and sugar | Blindness caused by deficiency |
| Vitamin B12 | Plant milks and meat substitutes | Deficiency where no animal food is eaten |
Rules govern what may be claimed and how much may be added, work overseen in this country by the Food and Drug Administration. Excess matters most for the fat-soluble vitamins, which the body stores rather than passing out in urine, so limits apply to the quantity and to the range of foods that may carry it. Adding vitamins changes nothing else about a product, and a fortified sugary cereal remains a sugary cereal.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The dietary history noted regular use of a fortified breakfast cereal.
Good to know
Fortification adds a nutrient a food never contained while enrichment restores what processing removed, so the two labels are not interchangeable despite being used that way.