Compuestos de hierro para la fortificación de alimentos: El desarrollo de una estrategia nutricional indispensable para países en vía de desarrollo. – Una revisión

La deficiencia de hierro (Fe) ha sido reconocida como un problema de salud pública, debido a sus implicaciones económicas y en el bienestar de la población humana. Para países en desarrollo como Colombia, esta deficiencia afecta a gran parte de sus habitantes, especialmente a los niños y a las mujeres en estado de gestación. De allí la importancia de generar estrategias como la fortificación de alimentos con hierro, con el objetivo de mejorar los niveles de consumo en la población y contrarrestar las consecuencias que se generan con la carencia de este mineral, entre las que se incluyen fallas en el desarrollo mental y motor, y alteraciones del sistema inmune. Por lo anterior, en la presente revisión se plasman los principales conceptos sobre la fortificación de alimentos con hierro, incluyendo los factores que influyen en su aprovechamiento a nivel fisiológico, su importancia desde el punto de vista nutricional, las tecnologías aplicadas durante la fortificación de alimentos y las últimas tendencias de este tipo de productos, como la bio-fortificación y la nanotecnología, con el fin de contribuir a los procesos de investigación y desarrollo de estrategias nutricionales cuyo eje central sea la prevención y el control de la deficiencia de hierro

Iron compounds for food fortification: The development of an essential nutritional strategy for developing countries. A review

Iron (Fe) deficiency has been recognized as a public health problem due to its health and economic implications. In developing countries like Colombia this deficiency still affects a large part of its population, especially children and women in gestation. Hence the importance of developing strategies such as food fortification with iron to improve the levels of consumption in the population and offset the consequences generated by the lack of this mineral, including mental and motor development, and immune system disorders. In this review, the main concepts of iron food fortification are developed, including the main factors which influence their physiological use, its importance from the nutritional point of view, the technologies used for food fortification and the latest trends in this type of products, such as biofortification and nanotechnology, all this in order to contribute to the research and development process of nutritional strategies whose central point is iron deficiency as an strategy of prevention and control

Use of Fourier Series in X-ray Diffraction (XRD) Analysis and Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) for Estimation of Crystallinity in Cellulose from Different Sources

Cellulose crystallinity can be described according to the crystal size and the crystallinity index (CI). In this research, using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) methods, we studied the crystallinity of three different types of cellulose: banana rachis (BR), commercial cellulose (CS), and bacterial cellulose (BC). For each type of cellulose, we analyzed three different crystallization grades. These variations were obtained using three milling conditions: 6.5 h, 10 min, and unmilled (films). We developed a code in MATLAB software to perform deconvolution of the XRD data to estimate CI and full width at half-maximum (FWHM). For deconvolution, crystalline peaks were represented with Voigt functions, and a Fourier series fitted to the amorphous profile was used as the amorphous contribution, which allowed the contribution of the amorphous profile to be more effectively modeled. Comparisons based on the FTIR spectra and XRD results showed there were no compositional differences between the amorphous samples. However, changes associated with crystallinity were observed when the milling time was 10 min. The obtained CI (%) values show agreement with values reported in the literature and confirm the effectiveness of the method used in this work in predicting the crystallization aspects of cellulose samples