In news guaranteed to make you say, “wait, what?!” it seems science has discovered a rather odd link between your baby’s intelligence and his, well… nappy offerings.
That’s right, an actual team of scientists have subjected themselves to analysing the fecal matter of almost 100 little monsters on the poo-suit to finding the answers.
Throughout the study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine separated the pint-sized participants into three groups based on the bacterial composition of their poo.
^Mums know what this face really means…
A year on, the same 89 infants returned to be tested on their cognitive skills according to the Mullen Scales of Early Learning, and surprisingly, they found there to be “significant” discrepancies between the three clusters.
The children whose excrement contained higher levels of the microbiota genus Bacteroides as one-year-olds showed better gross motor skills, perceptual abilities and language development by the age of two than the other two groups, who showed more diverse gut microbiomes.
“This is the first study to demonstrate associations between the gut microbiota and cognition in human infants,” says Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Rebecca Knickmeyer, at the UNC School of Medicine.
For more about the ins and outs of motherhood, LISTEN as host Claire Isaac quizzes Rhian Allen, the Founder and CEO of The Healthy Mummy, on ‘How To Be a Mumpreneur’ in the first episode of our ‘How To Be…’ podcast.
“We’re not really at the point where we can say, ‘Let’s give everyone a certain probiotic.’ But we did have a few big takeaways from what we found,” first author Alexander Carlson, an MD/PhD student in Knickmeyer’s lab, elaborated.
Inside the gut lies billions, even trillions, of microbes that we now know play a vital role in human well-being, impacting just about everything from our digestion to mental health.
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WATCH: Channing Tatum talks daughter Everly’s “poop face” in the video below!
