Physical and nutrient composition data of animal source foods

Abstract

It has long been recognised that, as part of a balanced, moderate diet, animal source foods (ASFs) offer a wide range of benefits to human health. For many years our ancestors made ASFs part of the human diet by following their basic human instinct to hunt and eat animal flesh in order to survive. It is however important to understand that the challenges surrounding ASFs consumption in South Africa are multi-faceted. South Africa is a country rich in diversity but poor when it comes to the general populations’ health. With a high prevalence of malnutrition in the forms of both under and over nutrition, it is clear that the consumption of adequate amounts of nutrient dense foods such as ASFs, is often lacking in diets of many South Africans. These nutrients include iron, zinc, high quality protein and B-vitamins. Large parts of the South African population lives in poverty and cannot adhere to the current national food-based dietary guidelines. One of these guidelines recommends that animal source foods could be consumed every day. Affordable animal source foods, such as organ meats (offal), and the potential nutritional contribution thereof were further investigated in this study. This study found that all analysed lamb and mutton organ meats from the fifth quarter of the carcass have the potential to contribute significantly to selected nutrients that were analysed and should be included in national dietary guidelines. However assessing consumption of animal source foods (ASFs) and setting product specific guidelines can be a challenging task without accurate quantitative data on the physical composition, edible portions and yield factors of ASFs. Physical composition, edible portions and yield factors of different cooked marketplace servings (retail cuts) of lamb, chicken, beef, lamb offal, mutton offal and some processed meat products were determined in this study. This study further demonstrated the use of this dataset as a tool when communicating product specific and easy to understand dietary recommendations, set by the South African nutrition fraternity. The tools and data compiled in this study can further be utilised by policy makers, health professionals, the food service industry and economists to effectively evaluate, predict and measure consumption of animal source foods in South Africa.