Nutrient deficiency is something we generally associate with the developing world. But in Australia? Hardly. But, apparently, iodine deficiency is so prevalent in Australia - around half the population is iodine-deficient to some extent - that the government is likely to mandate the use of iodized salt in breadmaking. At least one professor is arguing it’s still not enough:
“The iodine fortification proposal for Australia has been watered down, it’s really inadequate,” Prof Eastman said.
“Originally it was going to be in bread, cereals and biscuits.
“It will assist in improving the iodine intake for children but it goes nowhere near meeting the requirements of pregnant women.”
Lack of iodine causes goitre and thyroid problems in adults, but the effects are most serious for pregnant women and young children. Cretinism may now mainly be used as a general insult in the west, but it’s actually the world’s most common cause of cognitive impairment. Approximately 200 million Indians suffer from some level of iodine deficiency disorder. Even less severe deficiencies can cause cognitive deficits, according to Nutrition Australia:
Goitre is the best known, but least important of the disorders. Iodine deficiency has the greatest impact during pregnancy, due to its devastating effects on the baby’s developing brain and also on physical growth. In the worst cases of severe iodine deficiency, a child may be born with cretinism, a condition characterised by severe mental retardation, growth stunting, apathy, and impaired movement, speech or hearing.
However, even mild iodine deficiency can impair development and cause subtle deficits in visual motor skills, hearing and intelligence. Iodine deficiency is regarded as the world’s greatest cause of preventable brain damage, resulting in an estimated 80 million children suffering from some form of permanent mental retardation. In women of child-bearing age, iodine deficiency undermines fertility; and in pregnancy it puts the developing baby at greater risk of miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth. IDDs are a significant threat to the health, wellbeing, and productivity of communities worldwide.
I don’t know why the original proposal got watered down, but at first glance this is bizarre. Iodine deficiency represents the perfect example where intelligent public health policy can, at negligible cost, prevent a costly and cruel blight on the community. Why would anyone object to simple measures to fix it?
Thanks Robert,
back in the 50s and 60s, some salt sold in grocery stores and supermarkets was labelled “iodised” and the public seemed aware of its benefits. Were we not getting enough iodine then?
Or if we were then, and we’re not now, how did policies change? Are we (on average) using so little salt now, that the deficiency has grown? Hard to believe. It’s a pretty simple problem, with a simple answer.
A bit like banning supermarket plastic bags.
My grandparents used to throw salt over everything, whether it needed it or not (right up until they all started having heart failures). That’s why iodized salt isn’t such a great idea any more - we just don’t use table salt like we used to.
There’s a Foodstandards.gov.au inquiry titled “Food Standards Australia New Zealand: FSANZ seeks public comment on mandatory iodine fortification (Australia) and genetically modified corn” announced 2008-04-22 in media.australia.gov.au/rss.cgi if anyone is interested.
My family uses some fancy Sicilian sea salt. Cooks on TV and in the press often make a point about referring to ’sea salt’ in seasoning just about every recipe. Is this push toward gourmet salt a problem? I’m assuming these gourmet problems aren’t iodised. They sure taste better than commercial table salts.
Salt is of course still iodised. But we would hardly ever add table salt to anything these days.
And they’ll be adding folate to breads soon (if they haven’t already).
But any responsible mother is on a multivitamin, as recommended by their GP or obstetrician, and these have sufficient iodine.
The iodine story is a very tricky one,and in some ways reminds of the insight somebody made once about surgery with tonsilitis.The person who made the observation was referring to a cycle that seemed to occur every ten years.Which essentially meant someone in medical academia went back to some ancient research about the size of andenoids,spelling check later, and found they were waiting for them to be bigger as swollen glands.Whereas, they can be treated fairly easily without removal.The iodine story follows a similar path,and optimum amounts become a sort of flag waving exercise in the units of time measures of human need for this stuff.Iodized salt was a good idea at the time,but plainly ran with a potential of a problem whereby the salt impact and then iodine wasnt the most progressive of combinations.One must know ones’ salts,and,even then,the use of organic unrefined sea salt in small amounts of trace values of even iodine.. have critics.I just recent bought some Kombu organic kelp stuff from Maine,U.S.A.,imported by Kadac,and scratched away the Australian sticker on the food values on the plastic bag.Plenty of iodine…although I may have read some criticism of this stuff too.Perhaps it was the cooking. Didnt last very long with me,though. Flicking the side of the frontal part of ones’ neck is supposed to be a sort of rescue stimuli for iodine type inefficiencies.Unless I am cramping my balls again!Great Southern Land types. I read a lot of stuff in books in the early 1970s in health and bulk stores,and would still have these references,accept poverty meant I couldnt remove books with ease.The result of poverty has seen me lose about four of my own little libraries.Now and again something pops up in the news,that suggests I already knew that..concluded before the printing of the 1970s books I had.I confess I have no tonsils..removed at the year in which I was four.
As wilful stated, you still can buy iodised salt. This problem is the flipside of the ‘low salt’ message we have been given lately.
While we don’t want to overload our children with salt, they hardly going to have hypertension issues. Maybe they should add iodised salt to Vegemite which is a high salt product.
Thanks to Dave. It appears that the reasons why the standards body removed the iodization requirement from biscuits and breakfast cereals are in this report.
In short, Japan bans iodized salt in biscuits, so manufacturers would have to set up separate production runs for the Japanese and Australian/New Zealand markets if it was mandated here. Breakfast cereals were excluded because the way that manufacturers salt their cereals wouldn’t deliver a consistent amount of iodine, apparently.
Wilful: that doesn’t help the children with “irresponsible” (or just poorly informed) mothers…
Ambigulous,
We used to use iodine as a disinfectant/sanitiser in the dairy industry. This has stopped.
Combined with a large table salt intake, Australians used to get adequate iodine.
Wilful: It also wouldn’t help mothers (responsible or otherwise) who cannot afford expensive multivitamins.
cc, .50c a day for the first three months of pregnancy (so $45 in total), I reckon if you can’t afford that and are a responsible mother, you need to have another look at the definition of responsible.
Hmm, just wiki’ing iodine, it gives some more ammo to the aquatic ape hypothesis.
I wonder how much iodine it takes to get too much?
What are some natural sources of iodine to be included in a balanced diet?
Andos, just from checking wikipedia, it’s salt water or seaweed. Apparently cretinism is commoner the further from the sea or a seafood diet you get.
To expand on BigBob’s comment, when I was a kiddie, we got given a half-pint of (usually warm and slightly soured) milk every day at school, and were compelled to drink it at morning recess. (I haven’t much cared for drinking milk ever since, for some reason … ) The point is that the (reused, time after time after time) bottles were sanitised with iodine back at the milk factory, and the residue was enough to ensure none of us got iodine deficiency.
I always now ensure that what little salt I use in cooking is iodised.
Whee, another “irresponsible mother” badge for my collection! (Guess my GP and obstetrician get variants, too?) Is there a template we can print from?
That explains some things about Canberra…
The new (and more expensive) version of Milo, B-Smart, contains Iodine “for mental development”! I remember seeing a doco about an Australian neurosurgeon (or similar) working in Mongolia distributing iodised salt as deficiency there is chronic.
wilful at 11: “Andos, just from checking wikipedia, it’s salt water or seaweed.”
EAT MORE SUSHI YOU BASTARDS!
Bumper sticker patent pending.
David @ 12 This is Known as positive contamination,there was a programme on cretinism on the ABC recently which attributed the discontinued use of iodine in the dairy industry as a major factor.I think it may have been “Catalyst” about Professor Cres Eastman who is a world-renowned endocrinologist, based at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital and his work in Tibet
If, as others have said, they don’t throw much salt around these days, I would highly recommend changing that - things just taste so much better with salt. The links with hypertension are overstated in any case (at least at an epidemiological level - this may not hold in all individuals). I say mandate iodising all salt ….and chips….and gravox etc etc. I think Guido’s suggestion to use iodised salt in Vegemite is a pretty good one too.
We’ve been using iodised salt for years - thanks to the good professor of endocrinology and Radio Nationals Health Report.
# “And they’ll be adding folate to breads soon”
You might remember that last year the US Customs tried to ban the import of Vegemite because it contains folate (folic acid or vitamin B9).
Can’t remember the exact reason: something about it being illegal to add things to food or something.
Anyway, they didn’t go ahead with ban.
I have just checked two brands of multivitamins we have in the house and neither has iodine as a component.
Just whack a dose in my beer, please. (Not that one feels I need it specially.)
Interesting to see this issue raise it’s head again.
Concerns re iodine deficiencies in Australia motivated an extensive soil mapping exercise by CSIRO back in the ’50s. Apparantly many Australian soils have unusually low levels of iodine as a consequence of being very old and highly leached (Adelaide Hills being conspicuously deficient - note correlation with recent former Foreign Minister). Which of course translates into unusually low levels of iodine in diets based on Australian produce.
Parts of Tasmania are also apparently very iodine deficient…something I remember from my high school geography.
Thanks pablo - I was having one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments: I knew there was another part of the country where iodine deficiency-induced goitres had been a major problem in the past.
According to this site pretty much all of the fine wine-growing regions of Australia (except WA) are affected - perhaps there’s something to the ‘chardonnay-sipping’ pejorative after all.
Iodine’s in eggs, wholemeal bread, nuts, cheese and seaweed - also usually in onions though with vegies it does depend on the soil they’re grown in.
wbb: iodine and beer….
Pretty obvious that there’s none in beer. Evidence = observed cretinism in beer-swillers, both inland and coastal species.
Sea urchin has shitloads, as does, surprisingly, the Iodine Bream.
Then of course there’s Uter’s Joy Joys (”Jetzt mit iodine!”).
I irresponsibly decided to ditch the multivitamin when pregnant because it made me throw up all the healthy (and not so healthy) food I’d eaten.
If only it were as easy to ditch judgmental types.
Our grandparents threw iodised salt all over their home cooked meals. These days people eat a lot more pre-prepared/packaged/cafe/restaurant food, which generally isn’t iodised at the poor people’s take away end or the yuppie cafe end of the spectrum.
A couple of years ago I blogged about iodine deficiency and how I was (at that time) able to find iodised rock salt from Saxa in the supermarket. We’re still grinding down through the second of the packs I bought at that time (we mostly used iodised grain salt at the table and for cooking).
I don’t know whether there was sufficient consumer demand for it to still be available.
Anyone know if that lake salt stuff — which is reclaimed from over-salinated lakebeds in Australia — contains iodine? It’s pretty darned tasty and allegedly helpful to the environment.
Not really Nick - they talk up the magnesium and calcium, but no mention of iodine.
Although some salt sold for cooking and table use is iodised most isn’t, including the bargain basement stuff. I’m busy soaking olives from my tree in brine at the moment. I wanted to buy iodised versions but the cost differential was substantial (not because the iodine is that expensive, but because you can only get it in the brand name versions, not the supermarket house brands).
My understanding is that the dairy industry has not entirely abandoned the use of iodine as a sterilizer - this is happening progressively, so the problem will get worse unless something is done.
Hmmm. One wonders whether we need a campaign to convince restauranteurs to use iodized salt in their cooking, even if it is iodized sea/rock/Mongolian yak dropping salt…
Some chefs don’t like the taste of iodized salt; I’ve seen Stephanie Alexander refer to it as ‘bitter’ or ‘metallic’
No one has mentioned the supposed link between lack of Iodine and Cancer? In Japan they get plenty of iodine from their seafood rich diets and low instances of cancer. Here we have third world rates of iodine deficiency and high rates of cancer. Just sayin’.
I think Stephanie Alexander might have been suffering from a rush of blood to the head. My parents used iodised salt and so do I. I have also tasted non-iodised salt and surprise, surprise they both taste the same.
As a kid, I can remember that everyone was very conscious of the importance of iodine in the diet, because of the high incidence of goitre. This was particularly so in places like Kent in England which has very chalky soil low in iodine. My grandmother, who came from Kent, had goitre for which she had an operation and was prescribed iodine tablets.
Robert at [34]:
pray tell, where DOES one obtain Mongolian yak dropping salt these days? Our supplier in Richmond was a real sweetie and used to put aside 40 grams each week, but the poor little darling died of goitre and his indolent children closed the business, and we’ve just had to stop preparing OODLES of our favourite recipes because it just isn’t the same without Mongolian YDS, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you!!
think Stephanie Alexander might have been suffering from a rush of blood to the head.
See!? See?! High blood pressure. Probably caused by too much salt, What did I tell you!
wbb said: Just whack a dose in my beer, please.
Actually, the addition of Thiamine (aka Vit B1) to beer (Germans do, our brewers blocked it) to avoid aolcoholic neuropathy and psychosis (Hint: yeast is high in B1, so drink cloudy ales or barely-filtered homebrew) is a good model for food additive debates and the way industry behaves, and is perhaps worth revisiting with KRudd’s
populismefforts on alcohol.From [link]
In the 1980s, the Adelaide psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees, and others, rekindled the fortification debate by pointing out that alcohol-related brain damage was a major Australian public health problem requiring a national policy for thiamine fortification of flour, bread and alcoholic beverages. Yellowlees was not aware of the previous studies in Bourke. They might have warned him of the controversy that can arise from apparently simple dietary interventions. And that history was repeated. In 1987, the National Health and Medical Research Council recommended the addition of thiamine to beer and flagon wine, but this was opposed by both brewers and anti-alcohol groups.
The brewers’ argued that thiamine changed the flavour of the beer. In fact, the taste of thiamine can merge with the flavour of beer, but not with that of table wine. The brewers also argued that adding thiamine to alcoholic beverages would affect their export trade because such beverages would not be acceptable in other countries. They asserted that if Australian beers had to have added thiamine, so should beers that were imported into Australia. Yellowlees challenged these objectors to provide information about the number of alcoholics who developed brain damage through drinking expensive German beer and commented that their “stance was essentially the same maladaptive psychological defence mechanism as that of many alcoholics — denial”
Temperance groups and nutritionists stated that it was philosophically unsound to add good food to a bad product and that making alcohol into a super food was likely to encourage greater consumption. The compromise solution was to add thiamine only to bread, and this became mandatory in 1991.
Ambigulous: Well, since global warming has started to affect the nomadic wanderings of Mongolian Yak herders, the yaks have been spending more time on the steep slopes of the Himalayas, making it too risky to collect the droppings. Furthermore, the rising wages in rural China have meant it is no longer economic to pay immigrant labourers to wander around after the yaks with a shovel.
A few enterprising Australian farmers have begun to import Mongolian Yaks for the purpose of dung farming, but from all reports chefs at the two-hat and three-hat restaurants in The Age Good Food Guide are unanimous that the farmed substitute, while chemically identical, lacks the terroir of the real thing…
Meanwhile, Dimitri Mendeleev rotates slowly in his grave…
Like others, I remember iodised salt from childhood. It came in blue and white packets, similar to bicarb. My mother always bought it.
Apparently it is possible to have insufficient salt in your diet - something that was news to me until the Doc read me the riot act after I started getting massive cramps during karate tournaments. Interestingly I never had the problem in Japan, because their diet, although healthy, is quite high in salt.
Beside Lugol’s Iodine drops (now bought with a script from your family chemist) iodine is found in ocean fish, shell fish, spinach, seaweed,kelp, dulce, swiss chard, turnip greens, garlic, watercress, pineapple, peas, artichokes, citrus fruits and egg yolks.
Sandy, with plant food it depends on the soil. See Jane’s comment above about Kent. Eggs are a pretty safe bet, however.
With shellfish and other seafood it depends on the water and diet of the organism too. Although I’ve never had a sea urchin that didn’t taste pretty strongly of iodine.
w/r/t iodised salt - I don’t think I’d ever notice the difference with full-flavoured food when using it for table salt, but with some cooked or preserved things I definitely can, and it ain’t pleasant. I did a batch of olives once using iodised salt and the very salt-heavy “dry” curing method, and they were wierdly metallic.