New paper: Establishment of a Milk-Oriented Microbiota (MOM) in Early Life: How Babies Meet Their MOMs

A new paper just came out on which I am an author:

Establishment of a Milk-Oriented Microbiota (MOM) in Early Life: How Babies Meet Their MOMs. (Functional Food Reviews, Vol 5, No 1 (March), 2013: pp 3–12). Authors: Angela M. Zivkovic, PhD, Zachery T. Lewis, BS, J. Bruce German, PhD, David A. Mills, PhD

Link to the paper here if you have an institutional or other subscription.

I did not come up with the term "MOM" (Dave Mills did) but I thought it was brilliant, and I am glad to be part of the paper that coined the term. Its a good way to emphasize the importance of bacteria in helping a baby grow and thrive.

Little Johnny just found out he has TWO moms! (A Mom and a MOM.)
From http://www.flickr.com/photos/56323141@N00/2658949664

This paper is a review paper that talks about some of the latest research on how breast milk influences the microbes that live in babies. There are some components that help good bacteria grow (like the funky short sugar chains that good bacteria can eat) and some components that stop bad bacteria from growing (proteins that act like antibiotics, antibodies, and decoy molecules that fool pathogens into thinking they have attached to a cell and stop them from infecting us).

In this paper we talk about all the benefits that come from having a good mix of bacteria or "microbiota" in a baby. Associations have been found with the microbiota that include resistance to infection, reduced allergies, and reductions in other inflammatory conditions. There are even initial hints that autism might have a microbial component. This all suggests that having microbiota that doesn't cause inflammatory reactions early on in life might be important to educate our bodies about what is friend and what is foe.

The theory is that if the body has not-so-friendly bacteria in it early on, it seems to be hypersensitive to common allergens later in life. Bifidobacteria are very commonly found in breast-fed infants and seem to meet this non-inflammatory criteria. There is some evidence to suggest that they help calm the immune system down and keep the wrong things from getting to places where they might start triggering immune responses.

The "hygiene hypothesis" states that a lack of exposure to things that our distant ancestors commonly encountered ("dirty" things like feces and parasites and ... dirt) leads to our immune system overreacting to things that aren't really bad. As if it just gets bored and wants something to do, so it picks a fight with pollen or your cat's dander.

Felis catus, a common source of allergens. Sorry, I couldn't find an actual photo of one anywhere on the internet. Strange. I mean, I knew that very few people upload baby pictures, but it seems cats are even less common...

Some people think that if you have enough good bacteria around to keep the immune system busy monitoring harmless things it won't learn to react to the wrong things. With the recent explosion in pre-term and c-section births (both not nearly as survivable before modern medicine, and which are known to cause the baby to not get as healthy of a microbiota as easily) and the decline in breastfeeding, it seems possible that this could lead to at least some of the difference we observe in how many people in the "first-world" get allergies compared to how few people get them in the "third-world." Historically, mothers breast-fed their infants for a lot longer. They would continue to breast feed while weaning, a process which lasted a lot longer than it does now. The presence of the ingredients in breast milk and the bacteria they enrich might have helped keep the immune system from reacting to things like gluten and other common food allergens as they were introduced to the child.

C-section and pre-term births often cause altered microbiota profiles in the infant, which may have to do with problems in getting good microbiota from the mother. Shortly before this paper was published, but after it was submitted, Seth Bordenstein et al. came out with a really nice paper about how mothers pass on microbes to their infants across many species, not just humans (link here). You can go there for more details. I would have cited this paper it if it had been out.

One other point we made, which I though was important, was that diversity in an ecological community is not necessarily always a good thing. The common assumption I have seen many papers make is that a more diverse community is more stable and resistant to disturbances, and is always better. It may be that early on a more controlled community that is less diverse but maintained by specific inputs from the mother might be the better way to go for the overall health of the infant. A new Nature paper just came out on this subject, here.

Anyway, I thought we wrote a a nice overview paper if you are interested in learning about the benefits of babies being seeded with "good" microbes.