Impaired Gut Microbial Community Development in Undernourished Children

The healthy growth of children is typically considered from an anthropometric perspective: i.e. changes in height and weight over time. Another feature of postnatal development involves the acquisition of our microbial communities, the largest of which resides in our gut. Malnutrition (undernutrition) in children, and its severity, is defined by the degree to which their anthropometric scores deviate from median values established by a World Health Organization reference cohort of 8440 individuals living in six countries. Epidemiologic studies have shown that moderate to severe forms of acute undernutrition are not due to food insecurity alone. The human gut microbiota can be thought of as a microbial ‘organ’ that plays important roles in extracting and metabolizing food ingredients, providing metabolites to…