The Importance of Reporting Energy Values of Human Milk as Metabolizable Energy

Nutrition science has a convention to report metabolizable energy instead of gross energy. Metabolizable energy at 4 kilocalories per gram for protein and carbohydrate, 9 kcal per gram for fat (kilojoules: 17 and 37, respectively) represents the food energy available for metabolism. However, this co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFrontiers in nutrition (Lausanne) Vol. 8; p. 655026
Main Authors Fenton, Tanis R., Elmrayed, Seham
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Frontiers Media S.A 07.07.2021
Subjects
breast milk
calories
calorimetry
energy
energy metabolism
human milk
Nutrition
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Summary:Nutrition science has a convention to report metabolizable energy instead of gross energy. Metabolizable energy at 4 kilocalories per gram for protein and carbohydrate, 9 kcal per gram for fat (kilojoules: 17 and 37, respectively) represents the food energy available for metabolism. However, this convention to use metabolizable energy has not been uniformly applied to human milk. Human milk is often reported as gross energy, which is about 5–10% higher than metabolizable energy. To obtain accurate human milk energy estimates, milk samples need to contain the same proportion of high fat hind milk that an infant obtains.
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Reviewed by: Charikleia Stefanaki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece; Chris Pook, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Amy Hair, Baylor College of Medicine, United States
Edited by: Sharon Groh-Wargo, Case Western Reserve University, United States
This article was submitted to Clinical Nutrition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Nutrition
ISSN:2296-861X
2296-861X
DOI:10.3389/fnut.2021.655026