How the Vitamin A problem can be solved
|
|
There are a number of ways in which the Vitamin A deficiency problem could be solved: increasing the amount of green, leafy vegetables in the diet, developing and distributing cooking oil fortified to deliver provitamin A, vitamin supplements and more. Most of these are being pursued in different places, but all face practical or economic constraints that make them incompletely effective or impractical. And while Golden Rice is unlikely to be a perfect solution, it has much to offer and promises to overcome a number of hurdles that limit the effectiveness of other approaches.
How does Golden Rice Promise to Solve the Problem?
Golden Rice holds the potential to reduce dramatically the deaths and illness caused by VAD by increasing the amount of Vitamin A available in the diets of those for whom rice is a staple food. More than 3.5 billion people, nearly half of the world's population, depend on rice as their main source of nutrition.
Golden Rice is a type of rice that has been developed to deliver enough of the precursor nutrient that the body converts to Vitamin A to reduce or eliminate the symptoms of severe VAD. It does this because genes that produce the precursor nutrient, or provitamin, have been added to rice from corn and a common bacterium. These added genes, from sources humans have safely consumed for thousands of years, enable the rice to provide enough provitamin A to satisfy the body's needs and support good health.
|
|
|
