alt Hacker News> It also had more arginine, an amino acid that children need to grow.
My kingdom for even a tiny bit of scientific literacy amongst people who are reporting on science.
Not only is this absurd ("children" need all amino acids to grow...as does anyone else), arginine isn’t even one of the essential amino acids. Your body makes it unless something is seriously wrong.
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Arginine is a "conditionally essential" amino-acid, i.e. there are circumstances when the internal production is insufficient, so it must exist in food.
The need for arginine may exist during some illnesses and not for children in general, but for very young babies, especially for those born prematurely.
i don't have a PhD like you, but aren't some amino acids essential in young mammals and conditionally essential in adult mammals?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07533...
Thanks for explaining this, reading this in the article made me concerned as a parent.
Hopefully it's just my lazy reading/thinking, but this part of the article feels like scientism to me. Picking out some random micronutrients this strain has more of, praising that it has less gluten. It's just using "science" to justify whatever they already wanted to do.