Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids

Targeting the Infant Gut Microbiota through a Perinatal Educational Dietary Intervention

Study importance

The state of the gut microbiota during infancy may be relevant for development of the immune system and the brain. Animal studies highlight that there is a critical development window in early life, where disturbances in the gut microbiota cause problems with development of the immune system, metabolism and brain structure.

How did we do this study?

There is emerging evidence that a mother’s diet during pregnancy is related to the infant’s gut microbiota. What remained unclear was whether it was possible to change the infant gut microbiota by modifying the maternal diet. We conducted the Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids study to determine whether the maternal diet could influence the microbiota that babies were colonised with in the first month of life. The study trialled a dietary intervention delivered during the third trimester of pregnancy and compared it with the standard advice typically provided by health care professionals.

What were we hoping to find?

We aimed to identify differences in the types and quantities of microbiota present in the infant gut. If the findings showed that the prenatal diet could influence the infant gut microbiota, this would represent an important step toward understanding how to prevent allergies or mental health disorders by targeting the early-life gut microbiota.

Results from this study

This study was completed in 2021 and the results have been published here.

The Food & Mood Centre acknowledge the support of the Wilson Foundation in funding microbiome analysis for this study.