Formulation and acceptability of blended weaning food by incorporating banana, sweet potato and drumstick leaves powder

Abstract

The weaning period is a crucial period in an infant's life. At the age of 5–6 months, most infants begin to eat supplementary semisolid foods. At this stage homogenized infant foods play a major role in their nutrition. In developing country like India hidden hunger is one of the main problem due to deficiency of micronutrients like vitamins and minerals especially vitamin A, iron and zinc. Cereal gruel is the common complementary foods in developing countries, and it is usually low in energy and protein, thus increase in protein-energy malnutrition among underprivileged weaning aged children. In this context, the present experiment was conducted to formulate weaning food (7 treatments) for infants from malted wheat flour, malted ragi flour, malted green gram flour, roasted flax seed powder blended with banana, sweet potato and drumstick leaves powder. The formulated samples were analyzed for physico-chemical and sensory attributes The sensory analysis revealed that the weaning food mix with 30% banana powder, 10% sweet potato powder, 5% drumstick leaf powder had good sensory qualities in terms of overall acceptability (7.77).