Under nutrition is responsible for ~35% of deaths in children under 5 years of age¹. Long term childhood malnutrition is associated with reduced height achieved in adulthood as well as increased risk of chronic disease². This study aims to develop affordable and sustainable sources of food products and supplements that will improve growth parameters of children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

Though intense efforts are going on to develop affordable healthy foods to improve nutritional status of growing children, high inter-individual variations in genetic background, access to health care, living conditions, amongst others can make the use of longer-term outcomes such as growth parameters challenging^3,4. Changes in the profile of metabolic intermediates and other signaling molecules can provide an earlier read-out of the effects of nutritional interventions in such a setting. Though a few previous studies have examined protein and lipid kinetics in malnourished children, till date only Bartz et al have systematically analyzed this through the effect of in-patient milk-based formulations and out-patient supplementation with ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) on children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) by targeted and non-targeted metabolomic analysis.

As there is a dearth of studies assessing early and accurate markers of the effect of nutritional formulations on growing children, we propose to rapidly assess the systemic effects of novel food products on the growth of stunted but otherwise healthy primary school children through changes in the metabolome and the microbiome. Such markers can then be utilized in the future for testing efficacy of a variety of nutritional formulations for selecting the most effective, affordable and sustainable ones.