Early Nutrition and Feeding: Shaping Infant Health and Development

Dear Colleagues,

Early life infant nutrition is a foundation for lifelong health. This Special Issue of Nutrients invites original research, reviews, and translational studies that examine how human milk, breastfeeding and early feeding patterns broadly shape infant health including growth, immune maturation, cardiopulmonary, brain and overall short- and long-term development. We welcome multidisciplinary submissions spanning areas such as human milk composition (bioactives, stem cells, microbiome, miRNA, metabolomics), environmental and maternal determinants of lactation, donor human milk and formula comparisons or feeding practices in term and preterm infants, and mechanistic pathways linking early nutrition in all areas of infant health development including immune, cardiopulmonary, metabolic, and brain development. Studies integrating omics technologies, systems biology, behavioral science, health equity, and implementation strategies are particularly encouraged. Emerging evidence suggests that early nutritional exposures shape the gut–immune–lung–brain axis, with implications for conditions such as growth failure, allergy, obesity, lung and neurodevelopmental disorders. This issue seeks to advance biological discovery while informing clinical practice and public health policy to optimize infant health worldwide.

Dr. Karen D. Hendricks-Muñoz
Guest Editor

Dr. Jenny Fox
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.