Infant formula is a food manufactured to support adequate growth of infants under six months of age when fed as a sole source of nutrition.
Infant formula is necessarily an imperfect approximation of breast milk because:
- The exact chemical properties of breast milk are not fully understood.
- A mother’s breast milk changes in response to the feeding habits of her baby and over time, thus adjusting to the infant’s individual growth and development.[8]
- Breast milk includes the mothers’ antibodies that help the babies avoid or fight off infections and give their immature immune systems the benefit of their mothers’ immune system that has many years of experience with the germs common in their environments.
When Finnish researchers randomly assigned 230 babies at high risk of type 1 diabetes to receive either a regular infant formula, or one that was extensively hydrolyzed — which means the proteins in the formula are already partially broken down and more readily available for digestion — they found that the extensively hydrolyzed formula cut the rate of developing diabetes-linked antibodies in the blood by about half.
“We observed that early dietary intervention [with extensively hydrolyzed formula] decreased the frequency of diabetes-associated autoantibodies, which are markers of an ongoing disease process, by about 50 percent by the age of 10 years,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Michael Knip, a professor of pediatrics at the Hospital for Children and Adolescents in Helsinki, Finland.
The results of the study were published in the Nov. 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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