Strategies for nutritional enhancement

There is no single approach to the improvement of the nutritional quality of plant foods since this is affected by a wide variety of factors. Amongst these are:

• the application of traditional breeding methods to select for varieties with an increased level of the bioactive compound
• a reduction in the content of antinutritional factors
• the use of genetic manipulation to introduce new traits in plants
• improvements in handling, storage and food processing technologies.

Each of these approaches has a role to play but genetic manipulation provides a mechanism for the improvement of nutrional quality that overcomes the problem of the absence of a specific biochemical pathway in a staple crop.