Impact of soymilk-burkina intake on gut microbiome and nutritional status of Ghanaian women

Background: The microbiome of the human body includes the microbial community found within and without our various organs and tissues. The number of these microbes are more than our own bodily cells. In the past we did not pay much attention to these organisms except for those that pose immediate health problems. However, recently, due to improvement in detection technologies, a lot of attention is being garnered for the microbiome of specific organs and tissues of the body chiefly among them is the gut. Factors known to directly affect the composition and/or abundance of gut microbiota include but not limited to birth mode, use of antibiotics, genetics, and diet. However, much attention is now focused on the direct impact of diet on shaping the gut microbiome because everyone eats something irrespective of where or how we are born, sick or healthy.Rationale: Women of reproductive age are special group of people with higher need for nutrients. However, among communities with poor economic conditions, meeting the daily requirement of specific nutrients is very difficult. Women who live in such poor communities are especially prone to malnutrition with its concomitant health implications. In Ghana, there is a new product made from fermented cow milk and millet called burkina thought to be very rich in iron and other nutrients due to the fermentation that makes the nutrients more bioavailable. However, being made from cow milk, there is a risk of zoonotic transmission of infections if not well pasteurized and the high cost of cow milk which makes the product quite expensive. We aimed to use Soymilk as substitute for cow milk to produce this product and assess its impact on the microbiome of women in their reproductive age. We expected that this fermented plant-based milk product will be cheaper, safer and give better nutritional benefit to consumers.Approach: The product was produced and accessed for its consumer acceptability in the earlier work packages of this project. Women in their reproductive age including those pregnant, lactating and nonpregnant were recruited with informed consent into the project. They were divided into two cohorts for feeding with unfermented against fermented product for eight weeks (two months). Stool samples were taken before we started feeding (week 0) and bi-weekly for two months. We took two more stool samples two weeks and four weeks after we stopped feeding. DNA was extracted from the stool samples, enriched for bacterial DNA and sent for bacterial 16s RNA V3/V4 library preparation and sequencing by outsourcing for microbial community analysis.Major findings: From our preliminary analysis of the microbiome data, we have observed that before the feeding of our product, there was not much difference between the most abundant organisms in the gut of the two cohorts of participants. The baseline microbiome consisted of similar proportion of both beneficial (eg. Faecalibacterium prausnitzii) and potentially harmful bacteria (eg. Eubacterium rectale). This was good thing so that we were sure that we have two groups of people with similar microbiome before our intervention. There was reduction in the proportion of Eubacteriium rectale among the fermented cohort compared to baseline values. Higher proportion of this bacterium in the gut is associated with colorectal cancer. Therefore, reduction of its abundance in the gut of women who consumed the fermented product (15.2% to 12.8%) compared to an increase in its abundance among women who consumed unfermented product (13.3% to 18.2%) suggest potential benefit of this product towards reducing the likelihood of colorectal cancer among consumers who take this product for prolong period.