What are Enriched and Fortified Foods?

Question: What are Enriched and Fortified Foods?

Answer: Foods that are enriched or fortified have one or more vitamins or minerals added to them. Enriching a food means the manufacturer added nutrients to replace vitamins or minerals that were lost. For example, refining wheat to make white flour removes a lot of the B-complex vitamins normally found in the outer portion of the grain. So B-complex vitamins are added back into the flour.

Fortified foods have extra nutrients added to them too. But in this case those nutrients aren't normally there in the unprocessed state. Fortified foods are more common than enriched foods and include calcium fortified orange juice, iodine fortified salt and vitamin D fortified milk.

Fortifying and enriching processed foods is good because the nutrients are needed, however many of these foods, like sugary breakfast cereals and fruit-flavored (not 100-percent) juices, are also loaded with sugar that adds calories, but no additional nutritional value.

_Source:

_{Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. "Enriched, Fortified: What's the Difference?" Accessed February 12, 2008. http://www.eatright.org/cps/rde/xchg/SID-5303FFEA-D13B3A75/ada/hs.xsl/home_8388_ENU_HTML.htm.}