THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION — Eating too much fat and sugar as a child can alter your microbiome for years, even if you adopt a healthy lifestyle later, a new study on mice suggests.
The study, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, is one of the first “to show a significant decrease in the total number and diversity of gut bacteria in mature mice fed an unhealthy diet as juveniles,” the scientists wrote.
“We studied mice, but the effect we observed is equivalent to kids having a Western diet, high in fat and sugar and their gut microbiome still being affected up to six years after puberty,” UCR evolutionary physiologist Theodore Garland said.
Read the study in the Journal of Experimental Biology