Maternal Consumption of Dietary Fiber May Have Long-Term Benefits For Infant Immune Development

27 Apr 2015 --- The "developmental origins of health and disease" hypothesis is based on a growing number of studies showing that environmental factors - including nutrition - during fetal growth and infancy can have powerful effects on life-long health.

For instance, infants who grow quickly during the first months of life are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease as adults than those who grow more slowly. There are many purported mechanisms by which this early programming may occur including switching on and off certain genes and modulating establishment of intestinal bacteria. One such nutritional factor that may work in this way is dietary fiber (indigestible carbohydrates), which are utilized by intestinal bacteria as a food source. Indeed, some research suggests that maternal fiber consumption during pregnancy may impact immune development and allergy risk in the offspring. However, whether this effect is also seen during lactation and if it depends on the mother's allergic tendencies are not known. This topic may be especially important because the prevalence of allergies - especially to common foods such as eggs and wheat - has been increasing in recent years. To shed important light on this topic, a research team from Utrecht University and Nutricia Research (both in The Netherlands) conducted a controlled nutritional study using laboratory mice. You can read more about their work in the May 2015 edition of The Journal of Nutrition.

To test their hypotheses, the researchers exposed some of the mice to egg protein, causing them to develop an allergy to eggs. In addition, some were fed an experimental diet containing a trifecta of synthetic dietary fibers (oligosaccharides) while they were pregnant or lactating, while others consumed a standard laboratory mouse diet. The researchers then investigated how these different maternal allergic and dietary exposures during pregnancy and lactation impacted how the offspring reacted to egg protein when they were exposed to it as adults.
 
Compared to the control diet, consumption of oligosaccharides by egg protein-sensitized mothers during pregnancy or lactation decreased the offsprings' acute skin reaction to egg protein in adulthood. Additional benefits were observed when the mother had been sensitized to egg protein before and had consumed the experimental oligosaccharides during lactation. Taken together, the data suggest decreased allergic reactions in offspring born to mothers consuming this combination of oligosaccharides during pregnancy or lactation, although the exact effects depended on whether the mother had been rendered allergic herself. The authors concluded "these data show that long-term immune effects can be established by supplementing pregnant or lactating mice with nondigestible oligosaccharides." Of course, additional studies will be necessary to determine if these outcomes are the same in women and their infants.