BYU food team builds a better tortilla

PROVO — Every day in Mexico, mothers send their children to thousands of neighborhood tortilla mills that dot the country. Often, the children make three trips a day, buying delicious, fresh corn tortillas for each meal.

Many Mexican children get half their daily calories from the tortillas, which lack essential vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc. The unfortified diet causes stunted growth and other health problems.

A Brigham Young University food scientist has built a better tortilla, one with three times more thiamin, niacin and zinc, four times more iron and riboflavin and five times more folic acid.

If this sounds like someone reading the side of a cereal box to you, it should. Like tortillas in Mexico, cereal is a staple in America, a major source of vitamins and minerals for many children. Not coincidentally, the BYU team's research is detailed in the latest issue of an academic journal called Cereal Chemistry.

"It's very satisfying to know you've created something really good when you work on dulce de leche ice cream for Haagen-Dazs," BYU food science professor Mike Dunn said, "but it doesn't compare to seeing these sweet little kids coming into the mill and knowing you're going to make a difference in their lives. If we could get this spread throughout Mexico, we could have a significant impact on generations of Mexicans."

Dunn's team needed several years to perfect a new, fortified corn tortilla that looked and tasted the same as the traditional one. Early efforts didn't pan out.

"The Mexican government had a proposal for corn and wheat flour which recommended a particular iron source, ferrous sulfate," Dunn said. "They recommend it because you absorb the iron really well. The problem was that it gave the tortillas a green cast."

The other recommended iron source turned the tortillas a rusty reddish-brown.

"To us, they just seemed darker," said Dunn, who during the project used the Spanish he learned on a mission to Argentina for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "We took the tortillas to Mexico and the millers were alarmed. Unless you fix the color, they said, we're not going to use this."

Dunn's team tried nine different iron sources until it found one that didn't change the color. The body doesn't absorb it as well, so the recipe had to include a double dose. Still, the cost of the fortified premix the BYU team created is cheap enough the two mills Dunn worked with — one in Mexico City, one in Guadalajara — can add it to their tortillas without raising prices.

A nonprofit organization called SUSTAIN recruited Dunn and funded the project with help from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. SUSTAIN is working with the Mexican government and raising funds to bring the process to the more than 6,000 neighborhood tortilla mills in Mexico that could benefit from the fortified premix.

The mills BYU worked with ran campaigns to inform customers about their new, improved tortillas. After sampling them, some customers wondered if they were being fed baloney because they couldn't taste a difference.

"The tortillas were so similar," Dunn said, "they were actually skeptical whether there were really vitamins and minerals in there."

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