Special Infant Formulas

Abstract

Breast-feeding is still the optimal mode of feeding for the normal full-term infant. At the present time, no infant formula has been developed that can reproduce the immunologic properties, digestibility, and trophic effects of human milk. The nutritional content of infant formulas has come a long way since 1849 when Baron Justus van Liebig stated that all living tissue, including food, was composed of different proportions of carbohydrate, fat, and protein. This resulted in the first commercially available human milk substitute, Baron von Liebig9s Soluble Food, which was available in the United States by 1869.1 In 1884 Dr A.V. Meigs of Philadelphia published the chemical analysis of human and cow9s milk that has served as the basis for modern infant formulas.2 The stimulus for this early research for a substitute for human milk was based upon the recognition that not all infants have access to human milk. Infants fed with substitute foods did not thrive well, so attention was turned to the nutritional content of infant feeding mixtures. This emphasis remains to the present time, even though technology has developed in this past decade so that investigators are beginning to understand the importance to the growing infant of other factors such as the immunologic and trophic components of milk.