A Professor of agriculture, Veronica Adeoti Obatolu, has urged Nigerians to support the Federal Government’s effort and desire to achieve food sufficiency and security so that food can be on the tables of Nigerians. She also said achieving food security should not be the only target, but the country must also be able to boast of healthy foods.

The don disclosed this in Ibadan, Oyo State, recently, while talking on the imperative of products development and research, which she described as a major index in food security pro-gramme of Nigeria and other nations in Africa.

The Product Development Research Pro-gramme (PDRP) expert at the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training (IAR&T) Apata-Ganga, Ibadan, Oyo State, said, “there is no doubt that food insecurity directly correlates with poverty and agricultural food production, but product development plays a critical role in ensuring increase shelf-life and stabilising quality by optimizing nutritional value to keep everyone alive, an overall goals for food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable economic growth at different levels,” she stated.

On the correlation between a healthy food and  food security, Professor Obatolu asserted that while there is an increasing demand for convenience foods such as ready meals in fast food centres to fit in with our busy lives, then there is also the need to be more awardee of the risks of too high consumption of such meal which often times is high in salt and saturated trans fats.

Speaking further, she explained that in recent times, there were several interesting approaches for the development of healthy food products.

Product development research, she affirmed, could help to find difficult balance between reformulating food products to reduce levels of salt, saturated or trans fats, while their functional roles within food products are not lost.

“Trans or saturated fat, for instance, play an important role in maintaining an acceptable texture in food products. Alternative formulations and processing to achieve the desired texture could be used when it is necessary to completely eliminate this functional group of food component from a meal.

“Also salt could be  useful in lowering water activity, prevent spoilage and increases dough stability in bread,’ she emphasised.”

Commenting on her observations on the diets of Nigerians in recent time, the agriculture lecturer said that  she discovered that excessive energy consumption and obesity were emerging as nutrition problems in Nigeria and strategies are urgently needed to address these health problems.

“Research can increase understanding of the impact of specific food components on health, thus, leading to new product innovation in the area of functional foods for food security. Examples of such development include, pro-biotic bacteria targetted at boasting immunity, pre-biotic carbohydrates to selectively feed healthy bacteria in the gut and dairy peptides to help reduce blood pressure,” she posited.