HMOs are unique carbohydrates that are the third most abundant component in human milk. HMOs are not easily digested, so experts postulate that their purpose is to jump-start the infant’s microbiome as prebiotics.
Speaking with NutraIngredients at the recent Probiota Americas in Vancouver, Dr. Lars Bode, director of the Human Milk Institute at the University of California, San Diego, explained that HMOs do indeed have prebiotic effects, but they also have other non-prebiotic effects, independent of microbes.
There are as many as 200 different HMOs, and 2’-FL (2’-fucosyllactose) is the most abundant. As a result, it’s the most studied and the one that is already commercially available from a number of different suppliers, including dsm-firmenich, Novonesis, IFF (formerly DuPont), BASF and Friesland Campina, to name but a few.
“I think you have to start somewhere, right?” said Dr. Bode. “You want to look for those oligosaccharides that are most abundant in human milk, to try to at least mimic what is most abundant in human milk and add that to infant formula. 2’-FL is the most abundant in the milk of most women. However – and here comes the caveat – some women don’t make any of it. So, depending on where you are in the world, if you go to South America, most women are what we call secretors, so they make a lot of this particular oligosaccharide. If you go to the African continent, 35, 40, sometimes 45% of the population is non-secretors, so they don’t make any.
“In European and North American populations, you see about 20, 25% of the population that don’t make this oligosaccharide.”
Benefits through the lifestages
The majority of the science to date has focused on infants, but there is now emerging evidence that shows importance throughout life.
“I think that is super interesting, very exciting from our perspective as well, both from research, but also from application,” said Dr. Bode. “We published a paper just recently in JCI insight where we’ve seen that one specific oligosaccharide 3’sialyllactose, lowers the risk for atherosclerosis, which is the underlying factor for cardiovascular disease, so heart attack and stroke.
“We lose about 18 million people to heart attacks and strokes from this every single year. And this particular oligosaccharide works on inflammation in the systemic circulation, on macrophages. And macrophages are those foam cells that block your arteries when they suck up all the fat. And if you can reduce that inflammation and keep them a little bit more in check, then your arteries won’t clog up as much. And we’ve seen this works actually in tissue culture, but it also works in animals. Works beautifully. You can just give it, you know, orally, and your risk for heart attack is much lower.
“So, I see a lot of disease applications in later stages of life, like everything that’s associated with frailty, whether it’s atherosclerosis or cardiovascular disease, arthritis, metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity. I think there’s a lot to discover in this field.”
Watch the video for the full interview.
