Building a Better Banana
Boosting banana carotenoid levels could reduce vision loss – particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia
- Each year, between 250,000 and 500,000 children go permanently blind in Africa and Southeast Asia because of vitamin A deficiency – and worse, half die within a year of losing their sight.
- “Golden Bananas” could offer a solution (1).
- Bananas are a dietary staple in these regions, and boosting their vitamin A content (or that of precursors, like carotenoids, that are metabolized in the liver to form vitamin A) would yield a big public health benefit.
- In terms of carotenoid content, some bananas are better than others. Pale bananas such as the “Cavendish” variety produce less carotenoids than the orange “Asupina” variety.
- Cavendish bananas express more carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase 4 (CCD4) protein than Asupina, and the latter, “golden” banana, which stashes its carotenoids in microscopic sacs during ripening, protecting them from CC4.
- This knowledge should provide opportunities to breed or fortify bananas in order to make them richer sources of carotenoids, and help tackle vitamin A deficiency – food for thought.
- S Buah, et al., “The quest for golden bananas: investigating carotenoid regulation in a fe’i group Musa cultivar”, J Agric Food Chem, [Epub ahead of print] (2016). PMID: 27041343.
