New advances in the integrated management of food processing by-products in Europe: sustainable exploitation of fruit and cereal processing by-products with the production of new food products (NAMASTE EU).

By-products generated every year by the European fruit and cereal processing industry currently exceed several million tons. They are disposed of mainly through landfills and thus are largely unexploited sources of several valuable biobased compounds potentially profitable in the formulation of novel food products. The opportunity to design novel strategies to turn them into added value products and food ingredients via novel and sustainable processes is the main target of recently EC-funded FP7 project NAMASTE-EU. NAMASTE-EU aims at developing new laboratory-scale protocols and processes for the exploitation of citrus processing by-products and wheat bran surpluses via the production of ingredients useful for the formulation of new beverage and food products. Among the main results achieved in the first two years of the project, there are the development and assessment of procedures for the selection, stabilization and the physical/biological treatment of citrus and wheat processing by-products, the obtainment and recovery of some bioactive molecules and ingredients and the development of procedures for assessing the quality of the obtained ingredients and for their exploitation in the preparation of new food products.

Effect of lactose on gut microbiota and metabolome of infants with cow's milk allergy.

Allergic infants have an unusual gastrointestinal microbiota with low numbers of Bifidobacterium/Lactobacilli and high levels of Clostridium, staphylococci and Escherichia coli. Hydrolyzed formula used to treat these infants is deprived of lactose that instead may influence the gut microbial composition. The aim of the present study is to investigate the influence of lactose on the composition of the gut microbiota and metabolome of infants with cow's milk allergy. Infants prospectively enrolled received an extensively hydrolyzed formula with no lactose for 2 months followed by an identical lactose-containing formula for an additional 2 months. Healthy, age-gender-matched infants were used as controls. The following determinations were performed before and after the introduction of lactose in the diet: enumeration of cells present in the feces using FISH, counts of viable bacterial cells and gas-chromatography mass spectrometry/solid-phase microextraction analysis. The addition of lactose to the diet significantly increases the counts of Bifidobacteria and lactic acid bacteria (p < 0.01), decreases that of Bacteroides/clostridia (p < 0.05) reaching counts found in healthy controls; lactose significantly increases the concentration of total short-chain fatty acids (p < 0.05). The addition of lactose to an extensively hydrolyzed formula is able to positively modulate the composition of gut microbiota by increasing the total fecal counts of Lactobacillus/Bifidobacteria and decreasing that of Bacteroides/Clostridia. The positive effect is completed by the increase of median concentration of short chain fatty acids, especially for acetic and butyric acids demonstrated by the metabolomic analysis.