Dietary fibre intervention for gut microbiota, sleep, and mental health in adults with irritable bowel syndrome: A scoping review

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common functional gastrointestinal disorder affecting 4–5% of the global population. This disorder is associated with gut microbiota, diet, sleep, and mental health. This scoping review therefore aims to map existing research that has administrated fibre-related dietary intervention to IBS individuals and reported outcomes on at least two of the three following themes: gut microbiota, sleep, and mental health. Five digital databases were searched to identify and select papers as per the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Five articles were included in the assessment, where none reported on all three themes or the combination of gut microbiota and sleep. Two studies identified alterations in gut microbiota and mental health with fibre supplementation. The other three studies reported on mental health and sleep outcomes using subjective questionnaires. IBS-related research lacks system biology-type studies targeting gut microbiota, sleep, and mental health in patients undergoing diet intervention. Further IBS research is required to explore how human gut microbiota functions (such as short-chain fatty acids) in sleep and mental health, following the implementation of dietary pattern alteration or component supplementation. Additionally, the application of objective sleep assessments is required in order to detect sleep change with more accuracy and less bias

Like Mother, Like Child: Maternal and Child Factors Associated with Diet and Weight Status Among Preschool Children

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 25% of 2-4 year olds and 28% of 5-7 year olds were classified as overweight/obese in 2017-18. In recent years, there has been particular interest in how mothers influence young children’s eating behaviour, as they are frequently the primary-care givers during infancy and play a pivotal role at mealtimes from food purchasing, preparation and food habits. This thesis hence aimed to evaluate early life eating behaviors and obesity risk by investigating child and maternal factors in the preschool years. This research investigated: preschoolers’ diet quality; mother-child dietary intakes; trends in dietary behaviour and predictors of childhood obesity using information from an existing dataset, collected as part of the Healthy Beginnings Trial (HBT), a trial to test the effectiveness of an early childhood obesity intervention during the first two years of life. HBT data was used to examine nutritional outcomes in preschool children and associated changes in weight status over time. Key findings were i) the Diet Quality Index developed for Australian pre-schoolers has good reliability but limited validity; ii) two year old children’s diets were characterized by low vegetable consumption and high discretionary food intake with high-correlations between mother–child dietary intake; iii) maternal socio-economic status, in particular, young maternal age (<25 yrs.), low household income (<$40,000 /annum), and maternal country of birth (outside Australia) were associated with poor child diet quality in young children; iv) maternal overweight, maternal single parent status and child BMI at 2 years were key predictors of child obesity at 3.5 years, while child BMI at 3.5 years was the only predictor of child overweight/obesity at 5 years. The findings suggest that mothers may play a pivotal role in shaping early dietary behaviours predisposing obesity risk and findings can inform future interventions

Nutrition during the lifecycle: infancy and childhood

Food choices in the early years influence not only body composition and growth rate, but also the establishment of eating patterns that can continue throughout life. Dietary intakes during childhood and adolescence are critical in setting the scene for health in the future. Several studies have looked at growth in infancy as a risk factor for lifetime obesity. In a recent systematic review, there was good evidence that infants in the highest part of the size distribution for weight or body mass index were at increased risk of adult and childhood obesity [1]. In several other studies, however, it has been reported that \u27thinness\u27 at birth was associated with increased risk of diabetes and chronic disease in later life [2]. It thus appears that being at either end of the weight spectrum in infancy is associated with health risks in later life. In a study by Euser and colleagues [3], with pre-term infants \u3c32 \u3eweeks\u27 gestation, early weight gain (between birth and 3 months) had a more significant impact on BMI (+4.9SD) than later infancy weight gain from 3 months to 1 year (BMI+2.5SD) (p\u3c0.05) at age 19 years. However in the Euser study, the results may not be generalisable to healthy weight infants, as the study was focused on pre-term babies (-1.5 kg). It is interesting to note, however, that the period of early catch-up growth can also be associated with detrimental metabolic effects. Current evidence indicates that intervention strategies in infancy should emphasise improvements in linear growth in the first two years rather than weight gain, and avoiding excessive weight gain relative to height gain (BMI) after the age of2 years [4, 5]