Body Composition of the Fetus and Infant

At the Nutricia Symposium in Groningen in 1973 Professor Visser et al. gave a paper on “Parenteral nutrition in low birth weight infants” (I). In the discussion afterwards the question was raised as to whether the low birth weight infant should receive an amino acid mixture corresponding to human milk, or to fetal plasma, and it was suggested that the best mixture might be one corresponding to that of the baby’s body itself. At that time there were no figures for the amino acid make-up of the protein in the body of the human fetus. I promised that such information would be forthcoming, and this is the main subject of our paper today.