BYU scientist, specialists work together to fortify Atmit
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What happens when you combine an infant specialist with a fortification scientist? You get a new and improved formula for Atmit. In late 2009, Dr. James W. Hansen was asked by LDS Welfare Services to help develop an improved formula for Atmit. Welfare Services was anxious to have a product that would provide the needed nutrition to the wide array of people receiving it. Someone at Welfare Services suggested Dr. Hansen work with BYU, and he began to collaborate with Dr. Michael L. Dunn. It was a perfect fit.
Dr. Hansen received training in endocrinology, pediatrics and neonatology, worked for eight years at the National Institute of Health and spent 22 years in infant nutritional research. Dr. Dunn, a Cornell-trained food scientist with broad experience in food fortification, had conducted extensive research in the nutritional and physical properties of humanitarian food aid supplied by the U.S. government for famine, drought and disaster relief situations.
Together, Dr. Hansen and Dr. Dunn started work on an improved formula for Atmit. Their work shadowed recent guidelines published by the non-profit organization Sustain (www.sustaintech.org) in collaboration with several universities, as well as some existing World Health Organization recommendations. Their goal was to significantly increase the vitamin and mineral content of Atmit and position it as a fortified supplementary food to help compensate for the shortfall in foods typically available for undernourished populations and, in addition, supply a good amount of high quality protein and energy.
"We worked through the macro and micronutrient composition of the existing Atmit product," said Dr. Dunn. "We kept the same macro formula in terms of oat flour (51 percent), non-fat dry milk (23 percent) and sugar (25 percent), but altered the vitamin and mineral premix dramatically. We added a few additional vitamins that weren't in the old formula and then adjusted the levels of most of the original vitamins and minerals."
The scientists then started making adjustments in the formula, realizing that many of the changes might dramatically affect the taste and stability of the product. They finally settled on a suitable vitamin and mineral premix and sent it to the BYU Food Sciences Laboratory for taste and stability testing. One of their primary concerns with stability was the addition of significantly higher levels of certain minerals — such as copper and iron — which have the potential to react with and degrade many of the vitamins in Atmit and can also accelerate rancidity. They were delighted to find that the new formulation stood up well in stability testing.
"The Church wanted to make sure that the new formula would have a shelf life as good as the old formula did," said Heidi Engstrom, quality assurance lab supervisor in the Food Science Department at Brigham Young University. "So we evaluated the sensory and stability properties of the new formulation compared to the old, following a protocol proposed by Dr. Dunn and agreed upon by Elder Hansen."
