Dietary Exposure to Oxidized Lipids in US Infants

Baby Foods (BFs) and Infant formulas (IFs) are the main sources of nutrition for an infant throughout the 1 st year of life. A variety of enriched products are commercially available for parents seeking to fulfill their baby’s nutritional needs. Consequently, different bioactive lipids are present in BFs and IFs including dietary oxidative substances (DOxS) whose known toxicity has been associated with mutagenicity, cancer, and other chronic diseases. In this work, we performed an exposure assessment of 25 bioactive lipids on a total of 63 baby food samples (50 – IFs and 13 – BFs) commercially available in the US. To determine the dietary exposure to DOxS, we used EPA’s SHEDS-HT probabilistic model. Even though β-Sitosterol was the most exposed bioactive lipid with 75,4 µg/day, cholesterol was the most absorbed compound during the entire first year (19,320 µg/day). Additionally, we found 7α-hydroxycholesterol (7α-OH) as a potential DOxS biomarker of the BFs manufacturing process. This is the first time that an exposure assessment including DOxS ingested by infants after BFs and IFs consumption is performed, enabling much-needed information regarding these hazardous compounds and their potential effects on infants’ health.