Description:
Overview of Technology
This technology achieves rice nutrition fortification by shooting the nutrient particles into the rice grains. This introduces a rice coating process that fortifies rice grain. This method improves the nutritional value of rice, contributing to improvement of human diets worldwide.
Background
Rice is the staple food for over half the world’s population and is especially important in developing countries. This equates to approximately over 3 billion consume rice on daily basis. Among all cereal crops, rice nutrition is the poorest in multiple aspects. The nutritious out-layers including the aleurone, sub‑aleurone layer, germ, pericarp, tegmen and nucellus are remove as bran during milling. The milled rice is deficient in many nutrients including protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, and fibers except carbohydrates. Therefore, rice doesn’t contain sufficient nutrients to be life-sustaining if used as the sole source of food.
Milled rice is deficient in almost all major classes of important nutrients including protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, and fibers except carbohydrates. The protein, vitamin E and iron contents are particularly low compared to other cereal crops in addition to very little zinc and vitamin A. The poor nutrition has caused severe malnutrition problems in developing countries where rice is served as a staple food.
Description of Technology
Despite enriched wheat flour becoming successful for improving the human diet, fortifying rice grain remains a big challenge because rice is cooked and served as grains. Currently there is no method available to add nutrients to matured dry grains and make the nutrients stay with the rice grains during washing and rice cooking. Thus, most of the added nutrients got lost. However, washing the rice grains during cooking is a tradition and washing can help remove arsenic, a heavy metal which is abundant in rice and toxic to human.
MSU researchers have developed a method which delivers the nutrients into the interior of the rice grains via particle shooting. The nutrients stay in the interior of the grains during washing with little loss. The technology has the potential to significantly improve the nutrition value of rice meal.
Benefits of Technology
‑Solve malnutrition problem associated with rice consumption.
‑Improve the nutrition value of rice and rice products, consequently the commercial value of rice.
‑Improve human health and well beings by providing nutrition balanced food.
Applications
‑Produce nutrition improved rice grains, which ensures the consumers ingest the supplemented nutrients instead of losing them during the cooking process.
‑Produce other nutrition improved rice products such as rice noodles, rice cake, rice flakes, rice bar, baby formula and rice drinks.
‑Enrich rice grains with vitamins, minerals, proteins, amino acids, fats, oils, omega-3 fatty acids, pharmaceutical compounds, etc.
Opportunity
This invention provides ample opportunity for the development of more nutritious rice, which in turn can be used to produce a variety of other products.
It is a solution to the malnutrition problem associated with milled rice consumption, especially for children, and elderly in developing countries.