Grant: CIHR Fellowship

The nutritional quality of milk from the lactating parent is optimal and extremely important for hospitalized preterm infants, helping to promote growth and reducing the risk of infection. Under certain circumstances when there is not enough milk volume, pasteurized donor human milk is used to feed infants instead of formula. Donor milk is tremendously beneficial for these vulnerable infants and pasteurization ensures its safety; however, the extended high heating of milk destroys many important nutrients and biologically-active components. Heating also alters how milk proteins are digested by the infant. Instead, we are exploring high-pressure processing as a non-thermal alternative technique to traditional pasteurization. This requires donor milk to be pressurized to levels approximately 5000-times higher than normal air pressure without heating, sufficient to burst and kill bacteria or viruses. In our previous research, we have demonstrated this technology better preserves many of the components in milk traditionally lost during thermal pasteurization, including enzymes and immune proteins. However, whether these preserved proteins remain undigested and functionally-intact in the preterm infant intestine is unknown. It is critically important to understand this since protein digestion can impact how infants grow, and the molecules released once proteins are broken down, may also have critical functions in improving infant health and development. In a feeding study, this project will examine how human milk processing impacts protein digestion using gastric and intestinal samples collected from preterm infants. Results will increase our knowledge of the benefits of high-pressure processed donor milk in terms of protein digestion, providing insight into whether certain proteins can resist digestion and continue to function biologically. Ensuring safety and maximizing the quality of donor milk has the potential to positively improve health outcomes in these infants.