New Baby Formula Closer to Mother's Milk

March 1 -- While breast milk is still the best milk for babies, the newest addition to the infant formula family is trying to bridge that gap.

Mead Johnson Pharmaceuticals is now marketing a new line of formula in the United States called Enfamil Lipil that contains two fatty acids — decosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, and arachidonic acid, or ARA — that are naturally occurring elements of breast milk and are believed to play an important role in the development of the brain and the eye.

"What the formula companies are trying to do is get more and more like breast milk, because they realize that it is the gold standard," says Dr. Steven Zeisel, chairman of the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "There is no advantage of this formula over breast milk, but there might be an advantage over other formulas."

Adding Subtle Benefits

Formula makers, which have made the nutrients available in formulas overseas for several years, have been shifting their focus to products that improve more subtle measures of health, such as mental development.

Experts say that the period when an infant is being nursed is an important time for brain development. "Babies' brains develop for months and years after birth," says Zeisel. "Especially for premature infants, but certainly for regular infants, there is still a lot of brain development going on at the time the mother is breast-feeding the baby."

Making sure that nursing infants receive vital nutrients could help their brains develop better. But some experts are not quite convinced that adding DHA and ARA to formula is necessary. They maintain babies can make these fatty acids on their own even if they are fed other formulas.

"I would expect [formula makers] to add DHA and ARA to all their formulas if the evidence shows it is so helpful, rather than creating a new product line while continuing to sell their standard, presumably inferior formula," says Dr. Mark Groeshek, a pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente in Centennial, Colo.