INVESTIGATION OF REGULAR AND HYPOALLERGENIC INFANT MILK FORMULAS BY ATR-FTIR SPECTROSCOPY COMBINED WITH MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS METHODS

Abstract

Infant formulas contain nutrients and bioactive ingredients designed to meet the nutrition requirements of infants. The majority of infant formulas are cow's milk (CM) based regular ones. Since CM is one of the most important allergen source, there are specialized formulas such as partially and extensively hydrolyzed, aminoacid‐based for CM‐allergic infants. In the current study, attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) in combination with multivariate analysis was used to identify the molecular differences between commercially available hypoallergenic (HF) and regular formulas (RF) in Turkey. Higher saturated fatty acid (FA) content and qualitatively longer acyl chained FAs were observed in hypoallergenic formulations. The results of hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) showed that there were differences between the infrared spectra of the two groups. The HF and RF samples were clearly separated from each other in 1200-800 cm-1 spectral region with 83% variation and 100% accuracy.