In vivo assessment about the effects of a diet containing iodine enriched foodstuffs. A pilot study in 30 volunteers.

Background: Iodine deficiency (ID) still now rep- resents one of the major worldwide health problems. ID is the result of insufficient dietary iodine intake. Iodine is an essential micronutrient but scarcely present in nature. The main strategy for the correction of ID is the fortification of table salt with iodide/iodine but Italy is far from reaching an iodized salt use higher 90% of population. Also because of the evidence for the risk on blood pressure, it is recom- mended to decrease the daily salt intake to less than 5 g/d. An opportunity to increase the iodine intake is the possibil- ity to introduce iodine fortification in the industrial proc- essing of foods. Aim: The aim was to evaluate the effective- ness of a diet containing iodized foods enriched during in- dustry processing with protected iodized salt (Presal ® ). Sub- jects and methods: The evaluation of increasing of iodine intake was assessed by measuring the urinary iodine excre- tion (UIE) in 30 healthy volunteers who added to their ali- mentary habits a basket of iodine-enriched foodstuffs. Re- sults: Median UIE at baseline was 105 μg/l, 156 μg/l during the enriched diet and 90.5 μg/l a week after withdrawal of enriched diet. Conclusions: Stable iodized salt (Presal ® ) rep- resents a good way to introduce iodine with the normal di- et without increasing the normal consumption of salt for the healthy problems related to the blood pressure. The avail- ability of stable iodized salt (Presal ® ) allows the preserva- tion of iodine after cooking. (J. Endocrinol. Invest. 36: 667-671, 2013)