Nutricia Early Life Nutrition recently hosted a symposium to dispel the myths and uncover the facts about nutrition and the gut. Helena Beer reports

Diversity is key

The key to staying healthy and preventing obesity is having diverse gut microbes, which can be achieved by eating a wide range of foods. This is according to Professor Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College, London.

Microbes affect everything from mood to health and weight and, as Professor Spector explained: “Generally, the more diverse the microbes, the more diverse the fruits and vegetables people eat”. This goes some way to explaining why junk food has such a negative impact on the body. “If you’re just having junk food, which only contains about six ingredients, you’re getting virtually no fibre, apart from the little green gherkin thing which most people throw away,” said Professor Spector.

“So your microbes, which depend on fibre for their existence, they’re waiting down at the bottom of your gut for the remains of everything else – the real food – to come down there and they’ve got nothing to eat. So the brain is saying ‘I’m full of sugar and fat’, the gut is saying ‘I’m starving’.”

The solution to achieving a healthy microbiome is therefore to exclude nothing and eat everything. “Treat your microbiome like you would your own perfect garden,” said Professor Spector. “Sprinkle on probiotics like new seeds, give it plenty of fertilisers [prebiotics], high fibre, avoid nasty chemicals, avoid antibiotics, give it lots of variety, eat seasonally, try and eat something else new every week, and you’ve got a good chance.”

A window of opportunity

The first 1,000 days – from conception until an infant is two years of age – is important when it comes to recurrent functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) later in life, said Dr Nikhil Thapar, academic lead for gastroenterology at University College London’s Institute of Child Health.

“Even just by the first 12 weeks of gestation, we’ve got a gut that very much has adopted its mature position,” he explained. “So therefore it’s not surprising that if things went wrong in that first early period then it can result in disease.”

Discussing the concept of early life programming, he said: “There’s been a lot of research which has showed that if we focus on nutrition in that first 1,000 days, we’re probably going to end up with children that are generally healthier, suffer fewer infections, do better in school and grow up to have healthier families themselves.” But, he continued, it’s not just early life nutrition that can have an effect on the development of gastrointestinal issues later in life.

“A large Swedish study looked at the development of functional gastrointestinal disorders, such as abdominal pain, in children and showed that there was a higher incidence, especially in girls that were given antibiotics early in life, to go on to develop recurrent abdominal pain a number of years later,” he said.

Nutritional solutions

The “sheer desperation” of parents with infants who experience gastrointestinal (GI) problems often leads to them seeking ineffective and potentially harmful treatments rather than nutritional remedies, explained Dr Thomas Ludwig, principle scientist of paediatric gastroenterology, Danone Nutricia Research. “What has been shown again and again is that pharmacological intervention in functional GI disorders in infants is not efficient. However, the daily practice is still quite different to that,” he said.

Referring to remedies used to treat functional GI disorders, Dr Ludwig explained: “Defoaming agents, lactase drops and especially gripe water have been shown in systematic reviews not only to be not efficient, but also that there’s very frequently not even basic safety or tolerance data for randomised controlled trials for these very popular remedies.”

Dr Ludwig instead championed nutritional prevention and treatment. It has been shown, he said, that functional GI disorders are unheard of for breastfeeding and therefore “the most important thing in terms of prevention is actually to encourage mothers to start and continue breastfeeding.”

Support is needed to reduce harm

Parents need emotional as well as practical support to deal with their baby’s crying so as to prevent their frustration escalating and leading to harm. This was the message from Peter Richards, implementation manager for ‘Coping with Crying’, NSPCC.

A correlation has been found between the peak of crying – around two to three months – and the peak of non-accidental head injuries occurring. The NSPCC estimates that a minimum of 200 babies are seriously hurt or killed each year as a result of this.

“Parents often will be exhausted, frustrated, and they often won’t know why the baby is crying. It has been shown to cause a negative impact on couple relationships and even have long-term impact on parent-child attachment,” explained Mr Richards. This can also cause gastrointestinal issues later in life.

“So it’s not just about being told whether it’s, say, colic or reflux – not that either of those aren’t important – but they [parents] do need emotional recognition and support in how to deal with the practical side of crying as well,” Mr Richards continued.