Iodized salt seemed like a weirdly specific topic for the larger theme of food. Who, after all, even noticed if their salt was iodized or not? I certainly didn’t. But chancing on the iodized salt consumption dataset on UNICEF opened my eyes to greater humanitarian concerns. Iodine deficiency was one of the largest preventable causes of mental retardation in children across the world, in addition to a host of other health problems like goiter.
The presence of iodine in salt was an easy solution to iodine deficiency. Salt was used across almost all cultures, and the iodization process cheaper with aid from the UN. But as I charted the household consumption rates across the Global South, the results were puzzling. The rates were not low, that’s for sure. Most of them hovered around the low 80% mark. However, with the widespread passing of salt iodization legislation across the world, why was this number not lowered? It after all had clear benefits and comparatively lower costs.
After a bit of digging, I found some culprits. One of which was the increasing price of potassium iodate, used to iodize salt. There was not much data online, but in 2011, the cost of potassium iodate had hit what was then an all time high of 55–60 dollars per kilogram. This was deterring countries from iodizing their salt.
Moreover, not all legislation was foolproof. Some countries had made iodization voluntary, or simply had not enforced it. This was certainly in the case of Vietnam, where iodine deficiency was starting to emerge again in recent years, despite it being virtually solved before.
So, charting this graph was not so much about lamenting how people were not iodizing their salt, but bringing to attention again the importance of solving an easy problem of iodine deficiency. This was especially necessary in the case of some African countries who were still dangerously low on the consumption scale, i.e. Somalia at 4.4%. Mental retardation is a long term problem, and if we do not target it at the root — iodine deficiency from young, it is a painful legacy for the younger generations to come.
Some extra links to find out more:
http://www.ign.org/cm_data/idd_may13_asia_salt_law.pdf
https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/Sustainable_Elimination_of_Iodine_Deficiency.pdf
https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/iodine-deficiency/
