The Minerals We Eat: Iron-Fortified Breakfast
Some cereals are fortified with extra minerals.Copyright Scott Bauer, U.S. Department of Agriculture http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/dec02/k10137-1.htm
Students learn that minerals are a necessary part of our diets and that different minerals have different functions in the body. More specifically, they discover that iron is necessary to carry oxygen throughout our bodies. In the associated activity, students design a process to reverse engineer an iron-fortified cereal to determine how much iron it contains by removing most of the iron from the cereal.
One of the many things that food engineers do is fortify cereals and other foods with different minerals that are important to our diets. The process of reverse-engineering is often used by engineers to better understand how existing products work or to fully understand their compositions.
After this lesson, students should be able to:
- Explain that minerals are an important part of our diets.
- Explain that different minerals have different roles in our health and state some of them.
- Describe why iron is an important part of our diets.
- List several foods that contain iron.
- Describe why food engineers add iron and other minerals to cereal.
- Explain that the iron in our cereal is the same iron that is attracted to magnets.