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The decisions we make in life are often based upon compromise and a careful weighing up of our options. We know, for example, that we should eat a balanced diet, but tend to worry that nutritious food will cost significantly more. For those at risk of poverty in the EU – that’s nearly a quarter of us – this can mean opting for cheap, calorie-rich but nutrient-poor products. Existing data confirm that people at risk of poverty do tend to have poorer diets.

Taking the view that nutritious food does not need to be expensive – and that no one in Europe should be unable to afford to eat healthily – the EU-funded CHANCE project sets about examining how best to address this issue. What the team found was that food choices are often cultural, and that one novel way of targeting nutrition at those most in need was therefore to improve the nutritional quality of popular products.

Nutritious boost

“We applied low-cost technologies and put low-cost healthy ingredients into products that people like, in order to fill the nutritional gaps,” explains project coordinator Francesco Capozzi from the University of Bologna in Italy. “So this was not about changing consumer habits – not something that can be done overnight – but more of a ‘Trojan horse’ technique of putting things into products such as ketchup and pizza.”

Take for example pizza dough. The CHANCE consortium not only used wholegrain instead of refined flour, but also developed new milling techniques to improve flavour and texture. Adding bran to bread improves the fibre content, but gives a sandy mouth feel; new patented techniques were developed to reduce this unwanted texture. “All our products had to pass a tasting test,” says Capozzi. “After all, the products must be palatable to be successful.”

A new milling process for blueberry seeds – which are usually wasted in the production of juice – was also developed, allowing the bioactive ingredients found in the seeds to be turned into a paste and added to yoghurt to increase fibre and vitamin content.

“From our research we also knew that many people are deficient in Vitamin D, so we thought about adding this to ham, a very popular product,” says Capozzi. "We used puréed liver as an ingredient to enrich the food with vitamin D. You cannot use too much purée as it leaves a bitter taste, but as with everything, it is a question of balance and compromise. I should stress that all these improvements should not be seen on their own, but rather as part of an improved, balanced diet; there are no bad foods after all, just wrong diets."

A long-term legacy

Once the techniques and recipes had been honed and refined, the team worked with small food processing companies across Europe to develop the final products. Some of the companies are now using these techniques and recipes in commercial products.

CHANCE’s results could help to improve the diets of not just those at risk of poverty, but also people that rely on institutions such as hospitals, army barracks and schools – which have to constantly balance providing nutritional meals with their cost.

Indeed, the results of CHANCE promise to have implications that far exceed the project’s original scope. In the course of conducting some early research, the team discovered that making poor nutritional choices was not just a problem affecting those at risk of poverty, but rather, the general population as a whole. This was confirmed through the use of a pioneering metabolic tool that identifies biomarkers from urine samples.

"People respond to questions about what they eat in a subjective manner – and not everyone always answers truthfully – so this is why we looked at biomarkers," explains Capozzi. “A huge amount of data gathered that will take years to properly analyse, but what we found in the short term is very interesting.”

With the project completed, the partners are discussing the possibility of continuing to work together to exploit the CHANCE concept. A legal entity might be established for this purpose.