Published Paper Details:

Good health depends on good nutrition. Iron Deficiency Anaemia (IDA) is one of the most endangering micro -nutrient malnutrition in India. Mild to severe anaemia not only damage the quality healthy life of the people and their work capacity and productivity. The World Health Organisation (WHO) report already identified Iron Deficiency Anaemia as world's most serious health risk factor. The vulnerable groups are pre-school children, school going children, adolescent girls, pregnant women and partially lactating women. Food fortification is a cost effective process of adding essential micronutrients to food products in order to combat malnutrition. So far, several iron fortification work has already being done with different vehicles like flour, sugar, milk, soya sauce, fish, meat etc. but the concept of fortifying pulse flour is a newer one as amongst different pulses green gram dhal is consumed by many people in India. It has already been established in various in-vitro studies that bioavailability of iron is enhanced when foods are fortified with extrinsic iron, ascorbic acid as iron absorption promoter and Ethylene Diamine Tetra Acetic acid (EDTA) and Sodium Hexa-Meta Phosphate (SHMP) as stabilizer, specially in acidic pH, however, in vivo study with animal model gives more better concept. In the present study green gram dhal flour was considered to be the vehicle of iron fortification in various combinations and those were used to feed female albino rats of same body weight to observe its effect on serum iron and serum ferritin level of those rats. The rats were kept on simple normal diet to accustom with the new laboratory environment and then they were segregated into different groups and put on anaemic diet for 15days to look into the blood parameter changes. They were fed with fortified green gram dhal flour and normal diet for another 15 days. Both the serum iron and serum ferritin levels of female albino rats were decreased than the initial blood level, after getting anaemic diet but they were significantly increased after being treated with the feed of normal diet with fortified green gram dhal flour. Thus it can be predicted that fortified green gram dhal flour has a direct positive impact on the serum iron and serum ferritin level of female albino rats.