Killing germs around the house may have a surprisingly negative impact on young children’s waistlines.
Killing germs around the house may have a surprisingly negative impact on young children’s waistlines.
Breakthrough research out of the University of Alberta shows that frequent use of household disinfectants—primarily cleaners, but also baby wipes, that contain some kind of antimicrobial or antibacterial agents—likely increase the risk of obesity in young children.
“We found that infants living in households with disinfectants being used at least weekly were twice as likely to have higher levels of the gut microbes Lachnospiraceae at three to four months of age; when they were three years old, their body mass index was higher than that of children not exposed to heavy home use of disinfectants as an infant,” said Anita Kozyrskyj, U of A pediatrics professor and principal investigator on the SyMBIOTA project, an investigation into how changes in the infant gut microbiome affects health.
“We didn’t just find an association. Our ‘mediation’ statistical analysis suggests that a gut microbiome enriched with Lachnospiraceae early in infancy was likely directly responsible for children becoming overweight or obese,” she added.
Continue reading at University of Alberta.
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