Several concepts are being used to modify the intestinal
microbiota, such as nutritional changes or the consumption of
pro- and/or prebiotics (10). Prebiotics are defined as nondigestible
food ingredients that selectively stimulate the growth
and/or activity of one or more bacteria in the colon and thereby
beneficially affect the host (14). For infant formulas, a specific
prebiotic mixture of galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) and fructooligosaccharides
(FOS) has been described that can stimulate
the growth of bifidobacteria and lactobacilli similar to milk
oligosaccharides in human breast milk (6, 8, 42). Several reports
showed that the supplementation of infant formulas with
this specific mixture of GOS and FOS increases the numbers of