Abstract
In a previous paper, the digestibility of the sucrose ester of fatty acid in rats was found to be related to the HLB of the ester. This paper describes the situations in some detail by investigating the digestibility by rats of the sucrose mono-ester of fatty acid and the fatty acid composition of the ester undigested in the feces.
The sucrose esters were synthesized using stearic and behenic acids respectively as the fatty acid moiety. The mono-stearate and the mono-behenate were obtained after separating them from contaminants by the procedure of counter-current distribution. Rats were maintained for 10 days on the diet containing either one or both of these esters at 1% level.
The digestibility of sucrose mono-stearate and mono-behenate, when administered individually in the diet, was 97 and 30%, respectively. On the other hand, the digestibility of sucrose mono-stearate was 87% when sucrose stearate contained 50% of di- and poly-esters, and thus these results support the concept that the digestibility of the mono-ester depended on the amount of di- or poly-esters ingested together with the mono-ester. When an equal mixture of the sucrose mono-stearate and monobehenate was ingested, the amount of the mono-behenate excreted in the feces was three times as much as that of the mono-stearate. And correspondingly the digestibility of the mono-stearate and the mono-behenate was 80 and 40%, respectively, the data were significantly different from those in which either of them was singly ingested ; the stearate was less digestible in the presence of the behenate but the latter became more digestible by the presence of the former.
