“…Many newborns that are small for the ges tational age (small for date; SFD) show some clinical features indicating that prenatal nu trition is impaired [29], They also present some biochemical abnormalities which are characteristic of protein malnutrition [29], Numerous papers have been devoted to studies on plasma and urine amino acids in protein-energy malnutrition [3,4,10,11,13,18,21,23,27] and in experimental protein undernutrition [1,5,24,26] but these works have not always shown concordant results…”