Abstract:
The food packages of processed dry foods and instant dry foods mixtures which are produced locally, are widely available in the market. The most of such packages do not indicate the nutrients contents of the food inside. Nowadays, non-communicable diseases is the leading causes of death and diseases burden in the society. It has been documented that consumption of unhealthy food is one of the main causes for this. Therefore, knowing the nutrients contents of the processed foods and the instant foods is prime important to the consumers.
In this study, selected varieties of processed dry foods and instant dry foods which are produced locally and available in the market are used for the nutrient analyses. Those food varieties are rice flour, ulundu flour, kurakkan flour, white rice, red rice and kurakkan noodles, white rice and red rice string hopper mixtures, thosai mixtures and hopper mixtures. The crude protein content, carbohydrates content, ash content, fiber content, moisture content and total energy content of each food item were analyzed by following the standard methods. All the values were calculated for 100.00 g of food. It has been found that highest carbohydrate content is in white rice noodles (80.41g), highest protein content is in uludu flour (27.85±0.48 g), highest fiber content is in kurakkan flour (6.68±0.61g), highest ash content (24.02±3.90 g) and highest fat content (2.14±0.16 g) is in red rice string hopper, highest moisture content is in white rice noodles (8.82±0.07 g) and the highest total energy content is in kurakkan noodles (369.95 Kcal) among the items analyzed. The lowest fat content was observed for white rice noodles which was 0.18±0.03 g.
As a conclusion, uludu flour contains highest protein contents out of processed dry food used in this study, white rice noodles contains the lowest fat. The highest energy supplier is kurakkan noodles. This was the first nutrient analysis reported on commercially available locally produced processed dry food and instant dry food items.
