Washington: Research led by Queen Mary University of London suggests that nutritional interventions used to tackle nutrition">child undernutrition in lower and middle-income countries should target gut microbiome development, rather than just human nutritional needs, to more effectively improve child growth and development. The research, published today in Nature Communications, found that improvements in nutrition and household sanitation of children in rural Zimbabwe have little effect on a child's gut microbiome and thus, growth and development, and that genetic function of gut microbes in early life - rather than the types of microbes present in the gut - can predict how well a child is growing or will grow in the coming months.
