Dietary zinc and the zinc components in various foods subjected to in‐vitro enzymic digestion

Several foods consisting of animal and plant foodstuffs as dietary sources of zinc were subjected to peptic and pancreatic digestion. The soluble zinc components in their digesta were separated by gel filtration chromatography on Sephadex G‐50 with 0.1 M Tris‐HCl buffer (pH 8.0). The soluble zinc released on the enzymic digestion of the foods ranged from 41 to 98% with an average of 65%. Chromatographic analysis indicated that most of the soluble zinc consisted of between one and four components with molecular weights of around 10 000 or less, except for a component from egg yolk of higher molecular weight.