Nutritive Efficacy and Safety of a Modified Infant Formula With a Reduced Protein: Content and Improved Protein Quality: LactPro-Minus

Breast milk is considered the gold standard for early childhood nutrition, it is optimized in terms of ingredients to the needs of the infant in the first months of life. Formula differ in many ways in their composition to breast milk, e.g. in the structure and concentration of the protein contained.

To ensure adequate supply of the infant with all essential and semi-essential amino acids conventional infant formula contains significantly higher total protein concentrations than breast milk. Therefore formula-fed infants have a significantly higher total protein intake in the first few months compared to exclusively breast-fed infants, and individual amino acids are therefore fed in excess.

The increased intake of protein, and thus the increased intake of some insulinogenic amino acids in infancy (e.g. the branched chain amino acids leucine, isoleucine and valine), is now considered as a possible co-factor for later disposition to overweight and obesity. Breastfeeding induces slower growth of the infant and is proven to be associated with a lower risk of being overweight or obese at the time of school entry (von Kries 1999). The higher protein intake in bottle-fed babies seems to contribute significantly to the differences that can be observed in the growth behavior between breast-fed and bottle-fed children in the first years of life.

Obvious approaches to optimize infant formula are therefore the reduction of protein content, while ensuring an adequate supply of all relevant amino acids similar to breast milk.

Enrichment with alpha-lactalbumin enables the reduction of total protein content in the formula through the qualitative upgrading of the protein body and the high content of essential amino acids, thereby limiting a surplus of protein intake, but at the same time to supply adequate amounts of essential amino acids.