Content and distribution of iron in rabbit meat. A model study on nutritional values and bio-analytical variance.

摘要

Flame atomic absorption spectrometry was used to determine Fe distribution in the skeletal muscle from New Zealand White rabbits (n=49). Overall, the Fe content was 5.3 mg/kg wet weight. In all samples, muscle tissue from the foreleg region had thehighest Fe content (7.9 mg/kg), followed by samples from the hindleg region (4.5 mg/kg) and then muscles from the back (3.5 mg/kg). The anatomical heterogeneity of Fe proved to dominate all other sources of variation (P<0.001). An analytical error of 27%was determined for mean value estimation after 3-fold determination of 2 samples within 3 anatomical regions. Analysis of this error showed that the number of analytical replicates could be reduced significantly by improving the sampling strategy. It was concluded that the effectivity of elemental quantification in nutritional evaluation studies could be optimized by applying analyses of variance in a similar manner to that in this study.