Abstract
Dietary diversification, which starts between 4 and 6 months, is a pivotal period in the infant development. After this diversification, complementary foods such as infant flours are therefore widely consumed throughout the world, particularly in southern countries. However, infant flours have often an unbalanced lipid profile in favor of omega 6 and overages in certain vitamins content (especially A and E). The aim of this study was to optimize the formulation of enriched infant flour in order to improve its nutritional profile and oxidative stability. For this purpose, the nutritional values and ingredient lists of 96 infant flours were analyzed to formulate model flours representative of the marketed products. The lipid profile of these model flours was then optimized by including flours with balanced omega 6/omega 3 ratios, i.e. teff and cowpea flours, and/or by adding long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LC-PUFA) powder (DHA and ARA). After 3 months of storage, the optimized flour showed a quite good resistance to oxidation with a low evolution of peroxide values and a low tocopherols degradation. However, the inclusion of LC-PUFA significantly increased the oxidation sensitivity of the flours. In order to counteract this phenomenon, phenolic compounds were added via the addition of brown rice bran which did not seem to have a positive effect on stabilization regardless the particle size. Nevertheless, optimized omega 3 enriched and fortified infant flours could be proposed with fair stability over 3 months of storage.