Nutritional foods for little people

The first few months of life (when the brain is undergoing rapid development as neurons form connections) is an opportune time to give youngsters the best start in life (Muhammad et al., 2022). When human milk needs to be supplemented for the growing infant it is necessary to understand the nutritional benefits that a formula can provide. Determining the optimal formula mix for infants is a challenging space in food research due to the limited ability to carry out studies with this very young age group. Animals can therefore be useful as models for the human infant in terms of gut and brain because they approximate its growth pattern over time. The piglet gut (Calder et al., 2006) and brain (Conrad et al., 2012) develop in a similar manner and time frame to humans, and can therefore help us to understand how optimised infant formulas can support brain growth for optimal cognitive development - the mental ability for thinking, learning and memory. To be able to assess how supplementation of infant formula with different ingredients might affect cognition we wanted to establish a piglet model of cognition for the human infant.