IRON IN NUTRITION

Abstract

The fact that the iron content of milk is relatively low and that milk is the sole food of young mammals during a considerable period of rapid growth, makes the study of the relation of diet t,o the iron content of milk of practical importance.The familiar experiments of Bunge and Abderhalden showed that the ash of milk and the ash of the new born animal, of the same species, were very similar in all constituents except iron, which is almost six times as abundant in the ash of the young animal as it is in the ash of the milk on which it is nourished.Nature has compensated for this difference by supplying the animal at birth with a reserve store of iron, but often this supply is depleted before food richer in iron supplements the milk.If the iron content of the mother's milk could be increased by giving her a varied diet, some of the difficulties experienced with whole milk diets might be prevented.Sherman (I), reviewing the literature on this problem, finds varied results and conclusions.Some investigators claim to have been able to increase the percentage of iron in milk by feeding different compounds of iron, while others have arrived at the opposite conclusion.Much of this was early work and the methods for Fe determination were still crude.Recent work on this problem is very meager; in fact, the results which are recorded in the recent literature were obtained from experiments which did not have this specific problem in mind.Hess, Unger, and Supplee (2), in studying the antiscorbutic potency of milk produced by cows