Preliminary Investigation of Malaysian Foods for Sourcing Essential Mineral Micronutrients

Abstract

Abstract on global health issue. It is positioned by the United Nations records as the number one risk to health world-wide. Fortification and supplementation which are the main strategies to combat this scourge are artificial and could also cause side effects. This study aims at investigating Malaysian Foods capacity to supply the mineral nutrients, thus, preventing and remedying the cases. It is far more cost effective if commonly eaten foods can be shown to be a good source of these elements. In this preliminary study, the mineral micronutrient consisting of five essential major elements (Ca, Mg, P, K and Na), and five trace elements (Cu, Fe, Mn, Se and Zn) figured by United Nation as global deficits were determined in over 100 food samples availalable in Johor, Malaysia.The samples were dried, homogenised and wet digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. The elements were determined by flame atomic absorption spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. A descriptive statistics was carried out. All elements showed encouraging presence in all foods even in trace concentrations. The elements distributions were characterised at 95% confidence interval. The skewness value was not that low, indicating that the elements were not symmetrically distributed among studied foods. The kurtotic values were also high indicating a peaked clustered distribution. The overall preliminary study showed that some of the foods studied have self-sufficient and self-supplementing tendency to be relevant in the maintenance of mineral heath, remedy and even cure for many mineral malnutrition. In the future this study will employ the application of chemometrics methods to extract more information from the available data.