**4. Conclusions**

Cheese whey production is increasing worldwide every year. Even though CW is considered a major environmental pollutant, due to its quantity and quality of chemical components, there is a huge opportunity to use it as raw material to produce value-added functional compounds. CW lactose is an excellent substrate to obtain high quality products able to improve human health and well-being, e.g. lactitol, lactosucrose, GOS, lactulose, sialyllactose and organic acids. For example, GOS and sialyllactose have a bifidus factor similar to the effect of human milk oligosaccharides stimulating the growth of specific intestinal microbiota, enhancing immunity, promoting the synthesis of vitamins and decreasing the risk of colon cancer. Moreover, microbial bioprocesses use CW lactose to produce relevant healthpromoting metabolites such as kefiran and organic acids. Future perspectives are focusing on the sustainable transformation of CW lactose as by product into valueadded functional compounds to be used as novel ingredients in a diverse formulation of food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic new products. Therefore, additional research concentrated on the development of innovative technological processes, more efficient and able to discover new bioactive compounds are essential.

## **Acknowledgements**

Authors thank the Mexican Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) for financing the publication of this book chapter through the project 258483.

**85**

**Author details**

Hada María Guevara-Alvarado1

3 Universidad de Sonora, México

4 University of Copenhagen, Denmark

provided the original work is properly cited.

1 Escuela Nacional Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza, Perú

\*Address all correspondence to: jose.rodriguez@unison.mx

2 Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, México

Einar Vargas-Bello-Pérez<sup>4</sup>

, Néstor Gutiérrez-Méndez<sup>2</sup>

and José Carlos Rodríguez-Figueroa<sup>3</sup>

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

, Esther Carrillo-Pérez<sup>3</sup>

\*

,

*Value-Added Compounds with Health Benefits Produced from Cheese Whey Lactose*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94197*

*Value-Added Compounds with Health Benefits Produced from Cheese Whey Lactose DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94197*
