Nutritional Prehabilitation: Trends in Supplementation Based on Sustainable Dairy Protein Sources

Prehabilitation is an emerging clinical practice that aims to improve the surgical recovery and quality of life of patients undergoing intensive treatments. This review intends to describe the state of the art in prehabilitation, highlighting the role of nutritional strategies and the current trends in supplements.

Up-to-date studies have shown the importance of optimizing the nutritional status of patients to cope with the physical and metabolic demands of surgery and intensive treatments. In the context of nutritional prehabilitation, oral nutritional supplementation has emerged as a preferred strategy. The effectiveness of prehabilitation has been demonstrated in various clinical contexts. However, the lack of standardized protocols makes it hard to compare the outcomes. Despite the variability in this type of nutritional intervention found in reports, it has been shown that the most common oral nutritional supplements (ONS) contain dairy proteins. The use of whey proteins represents a promising approach from both a nutritional and a sustainability perspective.