March 10, 2008
Researchers with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Cornell University have developed new
techniques for boosting the amount of iron infants absorb from solid food.
Children who are five to six months old are growing rapidly and need
sufficient iron to fuel their development. However, this is also the time when
an infant's first iron reserves start becoming depleted.
Physiologist
Raymond
Glahn at the
ARS
Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research Unit in Ithaca, N.Y., worked with
Cornell nutritionist Rebecca Stoltzfus and graduate student Helena
Pachón (who now works at Colombia's
International Center for Tropical Agriculture) to find ways to increase
infants' iron uptake.
The team processed freeze-dried samples of chicken liver and beef in a
blender, which reduced the meat to small, uniform particles. They found that
these particles--which become distributed evenly throughout cereals because of
their size and consistency--can serve as a source of supplementary iron for
infants.
In addition, in vitro tests indicated that iron uptake from cereal
supplemented with the beef particles was greater when blending time was
increased. Chicken liver particles processed in a blender for six minutes
resulted in more than twice as much iron uptake than chicken liver blended for
just 60 seconds.
This research can help address iron deficiency-induced anemia, a
problem that affects as much as one-third of the global population. In
developing countries, infants and children are especially susceptible to anemia
because the solid foods they eat are often low in iron. In addition, they may
not be able to absorb the iron efficiently.
Adding ingredients such as chicken thigh or chicken liver to infant
meals can provide impoverished communities with more heme iron. This form of
iron, which contains molecules of hemoglobin and myoglobin, is more easily
absorbed and used by the body for nutritional health.
This work was funded by ARS, the National Institutes of Health, and
Kraft Foods.
Read more
about the research in the March 2008 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.
