Corn flour and maize meal fortification can benefit the consumer when the added nutrient contents are in amounts appropriate to address nutrient gaps. Legislative instruments (standards and regulations) are needed to provide guidance to the producers and food control authorities. We reviewed a number of national standards and regulations of fortified corn flour and maize meal and identified constraints; contrary to current belief, the practice of using minimum contents or ranges of nutrients has caused confusion, misinterpretation, and conflict, and should therefore be abandoned. On the basis of the findings, a model of fortification legislation is proposed, in which the additional content and the expected average nutrient content in a final product are recommended as the main parameters for quality control and enforcement. For labeling, the average content, or one adjusted to the expected content of the product at the market, can be applied. Variation in micronutrient contents should still be checked to ensure homogeneity but with adherence to clear procedures of sampling and testing, which should be part of the standards and regulations.Keywords: food fortification; corn flour; maize meal; micronutrients; fortification contents IntroductionFortification of corn flour and maize meal is one potential nutrition intervention for managing micronutrient inadequacies in countries where maize is a staple food produced industrially.1 These conditions are fulfilled in many sub-Saharan African and South American countries, where the fortification of this staple has either already started or is being considered.A program of food fortification should be guided by technical specifications that respond to epidemiological need 2 and to industry context of each country. Those specifications are gathered in standards and regulations, which are the most common legislative instruments applied to fortified foods.3 A few countries have also enacted laws for food fortification, although this practice is increasingly abandoned because of its rigidity in making timely modifications in response to changes in nutrition epidemiology or industry technological advances.The objective of this paper is to gather existent legislative instruments applicable to the fortification of corn flour and maize meal, to compare them, identify common limitations and constraints, and to propose a generic model that could improve the preparation of these technical and legal instruments. For the latter, this paper uses the estimations done for the case of Kampala, Uganda, in Guamuch et al., 4 in which details about how to use food and nutrient intakes to define nutrient contents in fortified foods are described. We explain in this paper how to calculate the values of several parameters that should appear in the legislative frameworks of fortified foods. These parameters are: the additional micronutrient contents that should be incorporated into the foods during the fortification process; the final average content and the allowable variation of contents at pr...

The objective of this work was to present a generic model for estimating fortification contents when several food vehicles are being considered simultaneously. It is based on approximating the magnitude of the nutritional inadequacy of the population (nutrient gap), the optimal use of the combination of food vehicles (fortifiable food energy, FFE), and the upper intake level to decrease the possibility that individuals with the highest combined intake of all food vehicles will exceed it. The model is intended to be used when only per capita food and micronutrient intake information, not detailed food intake data, are available. Food consumption survey data from Mexico and Kampala (Uganda) were analyzed for adult women, assuming that their intake may be similar to general per capita values. General adjustment factors for estimating the lowest and highest FFE and micronutrient intake for satisfying the requirements of other family members were calculated. These factors were used to estimate the additional effective content and the maximum allowable content, and then the recommended nutrient contents at the consumers' level were chosen on the basis of technological compatibility and cost. The method should be used in other contexts to test its validity as well as its application to nonstaple foods.

Ultraprocessed products (UPPs), associated with obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), are becoming predominant on the global market and a target for market-driven fortification initiatives. The aim of this article is to describe the implications of adding micronutrients to UPPs with excessive amounts of critical nutrients associated with NCDs and provide recommendations for legislation and policies. UPPs with added micronutrients such as breakfast cereals, sugar-sweetened beverages, powder beverages, fruit juices, sauces, and bouillon cubes, among others, are commonly available and heavily promoted in Latin American countries. Misleading advertising of UPPs with added micronutrients and with excessive content of sugar, fat, and salt might increase the consumption of such products, giving them a “health halo effect” that leads consumers to overestimate their nutritional quality and healthfulness. Although international collections of standards such as the Codex Alimentarius provide some guidelines on this matter, countries need to implement national legislations, through a food systems approach, to regulate the marketing and labeling of UPPs. Lastly, there is still the need to foster research to close knowledge gaps and help countries to guide the process of food fortification strategies from a regulatory standpoint.

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