Halifax researcher enriches fish sauce to save infant lives

When Mount Saint Vincent professor Kyly Whitfield arrived in Cambodia to do research as part of her PhD in human nutrition, she was shocked to hear babies there were still dying from beriberi.

Beriberi is a disease caused by a deficiency in thiamin, a B1 vitamin found in brown rice, but not in white rice, which is preferable to Cambodians.

"White rice makes up about 70 per cent of the daily diet," Whitfield told CBC's Mainstreet.

"But the moment that that outer bran is removed, you're removing the B vitamins."

A diet poor in thiamin makes adults ill, but can be deadly for infants, which Whitfield said is completely preventable.

Fish sauce solution

One look at a Cambodia dining table, and she had the answer.

"Fish sauce. It's in every Cambodian home. People eat it almost every day," Whitfield said.

As part of a randomized control trial where Whitfield followed 90 pregnant women for six months, she had three kinds of fish sauce produced locally. One contained no added thiamin, another contained a low level of thiamin and a third had a higher concentration.

At the end of the study, she had the blood and breast milk tested among the mothers and also tested the blood of the babies.

'Very exciting'

The results show both mothers and babies have the highest thiamin levels if they were consuming the fish sauce with the highest concentration.

"It was very exciting," Whitfield said.

Whitfield said one concern she did have was the thiamin might change the taste of the fish sauce, and therefore be rejected by Cambodians.

Luckily, it didn't affect the taste at all. Even when Cambodians did taste tests, they couldn't tell the difference between a regular fish sauce and one enriched with thiamin.

Wider use possible

She hopes that one day, thiamin enriched fish sauce will be sold widely across Southeast Asia, where many people have thiamin-poor diets.

"Fortification is a great intervention because people don't have to think about it," Whitfield said.

"If you choose a product that people are already consuming on a regular basis, people are getting the vitamin or mineral without even thinking about it and it's very low cost."

Brown rice not popular

Whitfield at first wondered if she could convince Cambodians to eat brown rice, but she soon discovered it's culturally unacceptable.

"Brown rice isn't consumed because it's a food that's fed to prisoners," Whitfield said.

"Brown rice bran is fed to the chickens and pigs."

White rice also is seen as a sign of wealth and prosperity.

Project recently published

Whitfield was recently hired as a professor in the faculty of applied human nutrition at the Mount, where she'll continue her research in hopes of saving lives.

Whitfield's fish sauce project was recently published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The research was done in partnership with Helen Keller International, and funded by Grand Challenges Canada, the International Development Research Centre, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.