In vitro estimates of iron bioavailability in some Kenyan complementary foods

Iron-deficiency anemia is by far the most widespread micronutrient deficiency disease in the world, affecting more than 2 billion people. Although there are multiple causes of anemia, its high prevalence among children-especially in developing countries such as Kenya-is attributed to an inadequate intake of dietary iron.

The main objective of this study was to assess the amount of bioavailable iron in Kenyan complementary foods and to determine whether strategies such as food diversification using locally available foods would improve the bioavailability of iron from these foods.

The in vitro iron bioavailability system/ Caco-2 cell model that mirrors the gastric and intestinal digestion of humans was used in this study to estimate the amount of bioavailable iron in the porridges.

The addition of cassava significantly increased the amount of ferritin formation in a cereal-based home recipe from 36.74 to 67.58 ng/mg. The in vitro data suggests that home recipes can provide an equal or greater amount of bioavailable iron as the commercially available nonfortified porridge products. However, in vitro assessment showed that the nonfortified recipes had less bioavailable iron than Cerelac, a commercially available fortified complementary food that provides about 26% of the RDA of iron for infants 6 and 7 months of age per serving (p < .0001).

In addition to diet diversity, more approaches to address iron inadequacy of complementary foods are required to improve the bioavailability of iron from the Kenyan complementary foods analyzed.