Influence of Singular First Foods on the Infant Gut Microbiome: A Randomized Controlled Trial

초록

Background: The gastrointestinal microbiome, integral to immune function, inflammation, and metabolism, becomes less malleable with age, making early dietary exposures, particularly first complementary foods (CFs), important in its development. Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of different first CFs on the infant gut microbiome in a pilot, randomized, controlled Methods: Vaginally delivered, exclusively human milk (HM) fed infants (n = 43) with no prior CF exposure were randomized to 1 of 4 groups (oatmeal cereal, beef, carrot, or prune) (NCT05492253). Infants were fed the randomized food (with HM) for 1 wk (phase 1), followed by oatmeal cereal for another week (phase 2). Daily stool samples were collected and sequenced (full-length V1-V9 16S rRNA Results: In phase 1, oatmeal cereal increased observed amplicon sequence variants compared with beef (P = 0.024). Prune increased Bacteroides ovatus (P = 0.001) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (P = 0.011), whereas oatmeal cereal increased Enterococcus spp. (P = 0.030) relative to beef. In phase 2, oatmeal cereal following beef resulted in increased Shannon diversity (P = 0.0497) and following prune increased Faith's phylogenetic diversity (P = 0.015). Unweighted UniFrac distances differed when oatmeal cereal followed prune compared with continuing oatmeal cereal (P = 0.042). Veillonella infantium increased with continued oatmeal cereal consumption compared with beef (P = 0.002) or carrot (P = 0.002), followed by oatmeal cereal. After prune, oatmeal cereal increased Lactobacillus Conclusions: Beef as a CF is nutritionally desirable as it contains important minerals lacking in HM, yet resulted in a less diverse microbial profile. Because fruit and vegetables yielded comparable diversity to cereals, future research should investigate whether introducing meat alongside fruits and vegetables offers a balanced alternative to early reliance on cereals and further evaluate how first foods influence taxa abundance at the genus and species level and the resulting immune-related and metabolic pathways.

키워드