A Mix Of These Foods Could Restore Healthy Microbes In Malnourished Kids

The condition wreaks havoc on biological systems throughout the body — including the microbiome, the healthy bacteria and other microbes that live in our digestive tracts. Those bacteria number in the trillions in every person and include hundreds of different species. They're essential for metabolism, bone growth, brain function, the immune system and other bodily functions.

In a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science, scientists in a renowned microbiology lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, report the development of a specialized food designed to rehabilitate gut microbes in severely malnourished children, a treatment that should facilitate both their immediate and long-term recovery.

The food — a spoonfed paste made from chickpeas, soy, peanuts, bananas and a blend of oils and micronutrients — was shown to substantially boost microbiome health.

The researchers are still working to understand the exact biochemistry that causes certain foods to have a greater impact on restoring the microbiome than others. But Lawrence David, a leading gut microbe specialist at Duke University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, says that the research represents an unprecedented step forward in understanding what a healthy gut microbiome should look like, how health conditions like malnourishment affect it and what interventions might work to repair damages.

"How systematic and thoughtful they are in designing this intervention is easily far and beyond fieldleading," he says. "It's totally remarkable what they did."

Childhood malnutrition is a critical global health problem that affects more than 150 million children worldwide and accounts for nearly half of deaths in children under the age of 5, according to the World Health Organization.

The treatment usually centers on a diet of highenergy, nutrient-packed foods. While some specialized malnourishment recovery foods, like Plumpy'nut, have proven widely successful in saving lives by promoting rapid weight gain, malnourished children often continue to suffer long-term health impacts, says Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.

Sonnenburg says there's a growing consensus among medical researchers that disruptions to the number and species diversity of gut microbes are likely behind many of the effects of malnourishment and also increase the risk of long-term diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, psoriasis and Type 2 diabetes.

The study, he says, offers the most promising avenue yet for finding clinical treatments specifically designed to treat disease by bolstering the microbiome.

"What they nicely show in this study," he says, "is that modulating the microbiome is a key part of navigating the path back to health."

Several years ago, Washington University microbiologist Jeffrey Gordon's lab began collaborating with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to study the bacteria found in fecal samples from healthy children.

Their goal was to paint a picture of a healthy microbiome as it changes — in terms of the total quantity of bacteria, and the mixture of different species — through the first couple years of life. With the help of powerful computer algorithms that sorted through the vast menagerie of microbes in each sample, they developed a catalog of microbe "signatures," characteristic combinations of microbes that are typically found in healthy children of certain ages. The diet that contained bananas, chickpeas and peanuts was the one that gave the best results.