Laura Schoenfeld: Can you tell me what HMOs are? I’m not sure if you mean some kind of bacteria.
I don’t know of any formulas that have actual probiotics in them. I think some formulas have prebiotics. I might have to do a little Google search. Oh, human milk oligosaccharides. I don’t really work with babies and infants. I used to work with them in my internship a couple of years ago, but it’s been a really long time. There are definitely formulas that contain prebiotics; however, if the formula doesn’t contain prebiotics, then what you can actually do is put prebiotics into the formula. The prebiotic that I would recommend using in the case of an infant or a child would be the galactooligosaccharides, and that actually could potentially be the same thing as human milk oligosaccharides. I’m not 100 percent sure. That’s a good question.
There’s an article that’s saying that in infant formula, galactooligosaccharides are added to replace HMOs, so I’m not 100 percent sure what the difference would be as far as the benefits of HMOs versus GOS, which is galactooligosaccharides, so I can’t speak to HMOs. However, if you did want to be adding galactooligosaccharides into a formula, there is a product called Galactomune that you can use. It’s by Klaire Labs. There’s a powder form that you can use to put into the formula. That is a galactooligosaccharide powder, and it can be added to the baby’s formula. I’m not 100 percent sure what the dosage on that would be. You’d probably have to check with Klaire to see if they have recommendations for that. That would be the prebiotic that I would use. It’s called Galactomune.
Then as far as the probiotics are concerned, there’s an infant probiotic by Klaire as well, actually, and it’s called Ther-Biotic for Infants. That is a powder as well, so you could use both of those powders and put them into the formula to help provide not only the beneficial flora from the probiotic, but also the beneficial fibers from the prebiotic. The reason that I like the galactooligosaccharides is because, again, it’s more similar to what would be in human milk.
Hopefully that helps. Try not to be too stressed about needing to use formula because there are lots of babies that are perfectly healthy on formula, and obviously you have to do the best that you can when breast milk isn’t an option. You could also look into breast milk banks if you really want to use human breast milk, but if you absolutely need to use formula, there’s no shame in that, and you can use the Klaire Ther-Biotic for Infants formula and the Klaire Galactomune as additions to any of the formulas that are necessary to be used.
Like I said, I don’t work with babies anymore, but that would be what I’m aware of as being an option from when I used to work with babies a couple of years ago.