THE ESSENTIAL
- Exclusive breastfeeding allows the mother to share with her child her “good bacteria”, which thus populate the infant’s intestinal microbiome.
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Exclusive breastfeeding would help strengthen the children’s microbiota. This is what a new study reveals, the results of which have just appeared in the review Cell Host & Microbe.
Carried out by researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba, in Canada, it shows that exclusive breastfeeding allows the “good bacteria” to be shared by the mother to her infant, even transferred from breast milk to the latter’s intestine.
“Our study confirms that breast milk is a major engine for the development of the gut microbiota in infants,” said Dr. Stuart Turvey, lead co-author of the study. “We discovered that exclusivity and duration of breastfeeding were strongly associated with the overall composition of a baby’s gut microbiota and that breast milk bacteria shape a baby’s gut microbiota to a degree similar to that of other known modifiers of the gut microbiota such as mode of birth – that is, a cesarean or a vaginal birth. “
A richer and more diverse microbiota
To reach this conclusion, the researchers recruited 1,249 mother-baby couples participating in the CHILD cohort study. They then analyzed the microbiota in the stools of infants and their mothers’ breast milk using a technique to identify, classify and determine the abundance of microbes: sequencing of 16S rRNA.
The results showed that while breast milk and the baby’s gut have distinct microbiotic compositions, there are a few common bacteria. These are more abundant in the breast milk of mothers who have only breastfed directly and exclusively. Other bacteria were not present in the microbiota of exclusively breastfed babies.
“These results advance the hypothesis that breast milk could act as an incubator that enriches, protects and transports certain bacteria in the baby’s intestinal tract, which could give us clues about the bacteria that could make good probiotics since they seem to resist the journey to the baby’s intestine, “concludes Brett Finlay, co-author of the work.
More research is therefore needed to identify bacteria capable of traveling from breast milk to the infant’s intestine and to measure their presence within the intestinal microbiota.
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