Numerous studies have demonstrated that beverages containing sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or alcohol are handled differently by the body than when sugar or HFCS are incorporated in solid foods and as a result the overall caloric intake from solid food does not adjust to account for the calories in these beverages. A consideration of our evolutionary history may help to explain our poor compensatory response to calories from fluids. This paper reviews the history of eight important beverages: milk, beer, wine, tea, coffee, distilled alcoholic beverages, juice and soft drinks. We arrive at two hypotheses. First, humans may lack a physiological basis for processing carbohydrate or alcoholic calories in beverage because only breast milk and water were available for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Alternatives to those two beverages appeared in the human diet no more than 11,000 years ago, but Homo sapiens evolved between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Second, carbohydrate and alcohol-containing beverages may produce an incomplete satiation sequence which prevents us from becoming satiated on these beverages.
Our data show that infants in our NICU who receive DM are likely to ingest HMO at different total amounts and relative composition from what they would receive with their MOM. Recent in vitro and animal studies have started to link individual HMO to infant health and disease. Future studies are needed to assess the importance of a mother-infant match with regard to HMO composition.
Human Milk Oligosaccharides (HMO) are the third most abundant component of human milk. More than a hundred structurally distinct HMO have been identified, and the HMO composition varies between mothers as well as over the course of lactation. Newborn infants receive donor milk (DM) when their mother's milk (MM) is inadequate or unavailable. Our objective was to compare HMO content between DM and MM. We used HPLC‐FL analysis of fluorescently labeled HMO to analyze the variation in HMO amount and composition of 30 different batches of DM provided by the Mother's Milk Bank in San Jose, California, and compared it to MM samples donated by mothers of infants in our NICU. Concentrations and variations of lacto‐N‐tetraose, lacto‐N‐neotetraose, lacto‐N‐fucopentaose I and disialyllacto‐N‐tetraose were significantly lower in DM than in MM. Recent in vitro and animal studies have started to link individual HMO to infant health and disease, and our new data may suggest that HMO in DM does not always provide the same benefits as MM.
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