Lactation and milk: A model for diet and health for all ages
Lactation and milk: A model for diet and health for all ages
In parallel with discoveries of nutritional targets and component bioactivities are new insights into principles of sustainability. The complex competition between maternal cost and infant benefit for milk’s resources are a vivid model for cost versus benefit relationships. Mothers literally recruit a unique group of bacteria to populate their baby’s intestine and provide them a selective food source, complex oligosaccharides, to keep them and their baby ‘healthy and happy’.
Dr. German's laboratory group focuses on research seeking to understand how to improve foods and their ability to deliver improved health. The model being used to pave the way toward improving the health benefits of foods is milk, which evolved to make healthy mammals healthier. Dr. German is also interested in personalized health and research is developing the means to understand how individual human lipid metabolism responds to the lipid composition of diets.