Scientists have developed a microbe-stimulating diet to help malnourished children grow up

One in four children will never grow to normal height. In developing countries, this number can reach one in three. The problem? Malnutrition.

Today, scientists have developed a diet that can stimulate key colonies of intestinal bacteria in children suffering from malnutrition. This discovery is important because previous research has shown that these bacteria are essential for healthy growth and development. The study paves the way for a new wave of food therapies focusing on the fight against malnutrition from the point of view of intestinal bacteria.

Nearly half of infant deaths before the age of 5 are caused by inadequate nutrition. And while therapeutic diets can help malnourished children survive, they struggle to cope with the long-term consequences: Surviving children fail to develop normally and end up with complications throughout their lives.

Scientists have been suspecting for some years that the bacteria in the intestine could be at the root of the lingering effects of malnutrition. They proved the proof but had not yet found a solution. Now, an international collaboration seems to have broken the dietary code to repair the damage caused by infant starvation on intestinal bacteria. They suggest that the patch could potentially erase the long-term effects of malnutrition.

The results of the study were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Immature bacteria

In 2014, researchers identified bacterial strains that change during the first two years of babies' lives. By examining fecal bacteria, they found that starving children lacked strains found in healthy children the same age – their piss bacteria seemed to come from much younger babies, they reported. The discovery implied that severely malnourished children did not properly develop their microbiome – the bacteria in the gut -.

"You can think of it as a development anomaly affecting a microbial community," says Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiome scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who led the investigation. "Most people think of human development from the point of view of our human organs or cells. But there is another dimension to our development, namely the assembly of these microbial communities.

The challenge of studying intestinal bacteria is that there are far too many species and they interact differently. It is therefore almost impossible to track them all and to measure the effects of therapeutic interventions, for example through food ingestion. To work around this problem, Gordon used advanced computer models to identify a group of bacterial strain signatures associated with healthy development that they could simply focus on.

This computer commitment was published in a different article published Thursday in Science. The identified bacterial group, which they called "écogroupe", allowed to evaluate the effect of dietary therapies on the gut microbiota.

Give microbes what they like

Gordon used mice and piglets to test changes in intestinal bacteria after eating commonly eaten foods in Dhaka, Bangladesh. There is a multi-year collaboration sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research.

Laboratory results showed that chickpeas, banana and tilapia were most closely related to an increase in good bacteria. But because of technical difficulties and cost constraints associated with the inclusion of tilapia in a therapeutic food supplement, researchers have experimented with other sources of herbal protein. They finally chose soy and peanut flour to replace tilapia.

Armed with the identified germ-enhancing ingredients, Gordon developed therapeutic formulations – a paste that mothers could simply spoon with their children – using various combinations. He designed the supplements so that they all have similar levels of protein, calories and fat.

Meanwhile, other team members in Bangladesh enrolled toddlers suffering from moderate malnutrition – which means that they were sick, but not near death – at a clinical study for test the food processing.

The distant effects of microbes

The study lasted only one month, which is too short to observe the actual changes in growth. However, the researchers measured over a thousand different blood parameters to paint a picture of children's health status. One of the newly developed formulations has caused noticeable changes in the blood of patients. The diet has boosted tens of proteins involved in bone growth, brain development, immune function and metabolism. No other group has experienced these changes, not even those with standard treatment.

At the end of the study, the intestinal microbes of the patients treated with the promising formulation were transformed more than those of their healthy counterparts – a change that no other diet had produced.

Gordon's study highlights the role played by microbes far beyond the walls of the intestine. He is currently working on a much larger study to confirm that the effects he has observed in the blood are reflected in height gains and a lasting improvement in health.

"It is important that we be the best possible guardians of the healthy development of the microbial gut community of our infants and children," said Gordon. "There are valuable microbial resources [in the gut]and we want to feed them so that our children can, as you know, be as healthy as possible. "