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A child in Bangladesh gets measured to assess malnutrition.
Even after starving children get enough to eat again, they often fail to grow. Their brains don't develop properly, and they remain susceptible to diseases, even many years later.
Two studies in
Science this week now suggest fostering the right gut microbes may help these children recover. The work also pinpoints combinations of foods that nurture the beneficial microbes.
Most of the experiments were in animals, but a small group of malnourished children given those foods also showed signs of improvement. "This is an outstanding and extremely comprehensive study," says Honorine Ward, a microbiologist and global health expert at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.
Tailoring food aid to foster the microbiome "could be a key to new strategies for improving global public health and human potential," adds David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Tahmeed Ahmed, director of nutrition research at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, in Dhaka, has tried for 30 years to help malnourished children recover better. About a decade ago, he was intrigued by work by Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, linking certain gut microbes to obesity. The two scientists wondered whether the microbiome — the set of microbes living in and on the human body — might also play a role in obesity's opposite number, malnutrition.
Comment: All this discussion of customer perception and acceptance really comes down to how to get people to incorporate poisoned propaganda into their psyches in order to change their behavior. Plant-based meats are genetically modified lab-created food-like substances - they're not food. Getting people to consider them food, rather than follow their own instincts, requires some master-level manipulation. Resist the putsch.
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