Gut Microbiomes of Mouse Pups are Permanently Altered When Moms are Fed a Low-Fiber Diet While Nursing
Published:27 Dec.2022 Source:Cell Press
The first things that mouse newborns touch and eat establishes their native microbiome, which is often influenced by their mother during birth and throughout nursing. Although diet has been a known contributor to obesity in all stages of life, the effects of nursing mothers' diets is an ongoing investigation. In a paper publishing December 8th in the journal Cell Host and Microbe, researchers find that when nursing mouse mothers are fed a low-fiber diet, their offspring's microbiome is permanently altered, leading to gut inflammation and obesity.
"We wanted to see what would happen if we gave a low-fiber diet to the mothers at the time their pup's microbiome is being wired," says senior author Andrew Gewirtz, a microbiologist at Georgia State University. "Would we see an increase in obesity in the pups due to an altered gut from their moms' diets?"
Obesity is often attributed to diet, and the consumption of energy-dense meals, such as "fast foods." However, so called "junk food" has been around for decades, but obesity rates continue to climb. Gewirtz and his team sought to learn whether the early microbiome could be an underlying factor that changed one's susceptibility to the ill effects of these diets.
The researchers gave nursing mother mice two different diets, either a fiber-balanced "chow" traditionally used in research mouse studies or a low-fiber food. After three weeks of nursing, the pups were weened, and their microbiome was analyzed through fecal samples.