Effect of iron-enriched bean-based diet on body weight, exercise performance and iron biomarkers in young adult BALB/c mice

Abstract

Iron deficiency contributes to the global burden of disease, affecting children, premenopausal women, and population from low-income and middle-income countries. To manage the deficit of iron on diet, biofortified crops can be obtained from conventionally plant-based foods. BIO102 bean is a biofortified crop with higher iron and protein content when compared to conventional beans. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effect of BIO102 food on body weight, exercise performance, and iron biomarkers in young adult BALB/c mice. To achieve this, 24 BALC/c mice were randomly assigned to each of the following groups (n=6 per group): Control diet (conventional diet 5010 Diet; CTRL), bean-based biofortified diet (BIO102), bean-based non-biofortified diet (NB), and corn-based diet (CD). The following parameters were assessed weekly from baseline to 8 weeks: body weight, food intake, endurance capacity, and limbs strength. Baseline blood glucose and hemoglobin measurements were made at the first, three, and eighth weeks of tail blood, and serum ferritin, hepcidin, C-reactive protein, and testosterone measurements were made at the end of 8 weeks of whole blood.During the initial week of housing (acclimatization), there were no differences among groups on neither food intake nor body weight ( p>0.05) (Figure 1). A significant difference in body weight from the second week of feeding with the natural diets was found (Figure 1). Due to signs of stress after three weeks of feeding, all the groups that took the natural diets, received 1 g of 5010Diet food as supplementation up to the end of the experiment. Both CTRL and BIO102 groups showed higher body weight gain when compared to NB and CD groups. Regarding exercise performance, no significant differences were found among groups (Figure 2). As for the iron biomarkers, no differences were determined for hemoglobin concentration and blood glucose in acclimatization (Figure 3). Interestingly, at three weeks, bean-based diet groups were significant different from CTRL group for Blood glucose concentration ( p<0.05) (Figure 3). Moreover, at 8 weeks, only CD group showed a statically significant increase in ferritin (Table 1). In summary, our results suggest that bean-based biofortified diet (BIO102) has a higher nutritional value than common crops such as conventional beans and corn, when compared with a control diet. This suggestion is because the mice feed with BIO102 diet kept body weight gain like those in CTRL group. In addition, BIO102 reduced fasting blood glucose, maintaining both endurance capacity and strength, as well as biomarkers of iron regulation. This work was funded by the following: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali-Colombia, El Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) y la Fundación Banco de la República. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.