The Availability of Calcium from Mexican and Californian Sesame Meals

IT HAS been reported that chicks can better utilize the zinc from animal proteins than from plant proteins, O’Dell and Savage (1957) and Moeller and Scott (1958). Smith et al. (1962) made similar observations with swine. O’Dell and Savage (1960) observed that the addition of phytic acid to animal protein diets decreased the availability of zinc for chicks. This observation and similar results with pigs (Oberleas et al., 1962) led to the hypothesis that the difference in availability between animal and plant protein is due to the phytate content of the plant protein. In a subsequent paper O’Dell et al. (1964) further corroborated this hypothesis since they found that the addition of phytic acid markedly decreased the biological availability of zinc whether complexed with the casein or simply premixed with glucose. On the other hand, Norris and Davis (1960), and McCall et al. (1961) indicated that a zinc protein-phytic acid …