Studies on the Nutritional Improvement of the Farming Village Diets (Part 1)

An experiment on the weanling rats was proceeded to estimate the nutritional value of three soybean products, “Miton”, “Shinsei-tofu” and “Mame-no-hana”.The farming village diet in the Japanese Nutritional Survey was used as the control diet, in which animal protein (fish meal and skim milk) content is 33% of total protein. The low protein diet was prepared by excluding the animal protein from the above mentioned control diet.Each soybean product was respectively added to the low protein diet to make the protein content as the control. About 40% of the total protein of these experimental diets was supplied from soybean.Of the experimental animals, increasing rate of the body weight, weights of liver, spleen and kidney, efficiency ratio of diet and protein, lengths and weights of bones, calcification of bones, serum protein concentration, alkaline phosphatase activity and liver xanthine oxidase activity were estimated for the indication of the nutritional values of these diets.The followings were concluded from the experiment. The low protein diets revealed the lowest nutritional value. However, the three diets containing each of three soybean products showed almost the same value and also had a higher nutritional value compared with the control and skim milk diets.