Enter to learn, go forth to serve.

Dr. Michael Dunn, a food scientist at BYU, along with a research team, has taken this well-known BYU motto and used it in recent research to help enrich Mexicans' diets.

Receiving a mentoring environment grant through the ORCA office, a Bill and Melinda Gates foundation grant and funding from SUSTAIN, a non-profit organization, the team lead by Dunn began a three-year research project on how to fortify corn tortillas in Mexico.

SUSTAIN's Web site, sustaintech.org, said "850 million people, or 12.6 percent of the estimated world population, are undernourished. Most of the 850 million are in developing countries."

"SUSTAIN confronts the global challenges of micro-nutrient, protein and energy malnutrition with applied expertise in food manufacturing, quality assurance, product development and formulation, market research and distribution," the SUSTAIN Web site said.

Dunn was approached by SUSTAIN when he was working in the International Food Network, which specializes in food science.

Following Dunn to BYU, SUSTAIN presented the research they had been doing on fortified flour.

According to Dunn, flour fortification has been around for decades but Mexico's flour fortification regulations are still being developed, thus the reason for the lack of vitamin-enriched tortillas.

Corn tortillas are a staple food in Mexico, Dunn said. Many families go to the market once or twice a day to purchase them.

The challenge Dunn and his research team faced was implementing a technology completely revolutionary to wet-mill grinding.

The team implemented their research in Mexico City and Guadalajara, two of the largest cities in Mexico. Although there are around 12,000 neighborhood mills around Mexico, they started here.

Before Dunn's research, 60 percent or more of the corn tortillas were not being made from flour. The mill workers would take corn, cook it in calcium hydroxide and run it through a nixtamal mill to create the dough for the tortillas.

After meeting with the wet millers, representatives from the flour industry, people from the government and suppliers in a brainstorm meeting, Dunn and his team took the proposed ideas the group had and tested them in their BYU lab as well as a Taylorsville mill which was making the traditional corn tortillas for the Hispanic population.

"We honed in on specific mixture that did not affect the color or flavor," Dunn said. "We then took our findings to Mexico and tried it out and did additional refining of the process until it was commercially feasible."

The specific vitamin mixture were being made with additional micro-nutrients such as zinc, folic acid, riboflavin and other traditional vitamins and minerals that are added to cereal enrichment.

Because the added mixture is so small, Dunn said, the millers in Mexico were able to keep the cost of the tortillas low.

The fortified tortillas were given to a panel of Mexican consumers who taste-tested the product and said they could not tell the difference from the regular, unfortified tortillas.

"This project has been so satisfying," Dunn said. "There were many hurtles along the way but going into the mills in Mexico and seeing those children coming into the shop to get tortillas for their families, I realized I'm making a difference in their lives. It was a lot of work, but that experience makes it all worth it."

Copyright Brigham Young University 13 Nov 2008