Helpful infant gut bacterium, Bifidobacterium infantis, uses special breast milk sugars to grow that other bacteria can’t use. Breast Milk Sugars Don’t Feed the Infant As parents we often try to limit sugar for our kids. However, with breast milk – the sugars are essential food for helpful bacteria that grow in an infant’s gut. Along with fats, water, antioxidants from mom’s diet, antibodies, and other compounds, breast milk has a diversity of complex carbohydrate sugars. Called human milk oligosaccharides (HMO), these chains of carbohydrates bonded together are difficult to break apart. Humans do not make the enzymes that can break these breast milk sugar bonds [1, 2]. Our helpful gut bacteria do [3-6]. Infants and most gut bacteria don’t have the enzymes in their guts to digest the sugars that dominate human breast milk. The beneficial bacterium, Bifidobacterium infantis, uses enzyme Endo BI-1 for breaking sugars to use for food. This may explain why B. infantis dominates the gut of breast fed babies. HMO sugars are extremely different from their refined and over-processed cousins that we use to sweeten our drinks and solid foods. Refined and processed sugars are primarily simple carbohydrates made of a few carbon molecules bound together
