Will the Extra Micronutrients in Staple Foods be Bioavailable?
An underlying cause and fundamental constraint to solving the micronutrient malnutrition problem is that non-staple foods, particularly animal products, tend to be the foods richest in bioavailable micronutrients. These are precisely the foods that the poor in developing countries cannot afford. Their diets consist mostly of staple foods, primarily cereals. For the poor, these staple foods already are primary sources of what micronutrients they are able to consume, particularly minerals. This is demonstrated by food intake data shown in Table 1 for survey populations in Bangladesh and the Philippines. Average incomes in these households range from US $45 per capita per year in the poorest 20 percent of households to $250 in the richest 20 percent of households. Thus, they are typical of the middle to lower end of the income distribution in the rural areas of these countries. The first priority for these poor households in terms of food purchases is to obtain calories to satiate hunger.
