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Food allergy affects families' quality of life, can be lifelong and life-threatening, urging the identification of early modifiable risk factors. Formula feeding in the first days of life may increase the risk of cow's milk allergy, a risk often attributed to cow's milk allergens exposure. Early formula feeding also reduces the colostrum intake, the first 3 days' milk, which is rich in bioactive compounds critical for immune and gut health. This study investigates whether partial colostrum feeding increases the risk of food allergy beyond cow's milk.

Meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials have found that introducing eggs and peanuts earlier during infancy reduced egg and peanut allergy risk. Hence, infant feeding advice has dramatically changed from previous recommendations of avoidance to current recommendations of inclusion of common food allergens in infant diets.

Early infancy is a critical period for immune development. In addition to being the primary food source during early infancy, human milk also provides multiple bioactive components that shape the infant gut microbiome and immune system and provides a constant source of exposure to maternal microbiota. Given the potential interplay between allergic diseases and the human microbiome, this study aimed to characterise the milk microbiome of allergic mothers.

A mother's diet during pregnancy may influence her infant's immune development. However, as potential interactions between components of our dietary intakes can make any nutritional analysis complex, here we took a multi-component dietary analysis approach.

Ingestion of prebiotics during pregnancy and lactation may have immunomodulatory benefits for the developing fetal and infant immune system and provide a potential dietary strategy to reduce the risk of allergic diseases. We sought to determine whether maternal supplementation with dietary prebiotics reduces the risk of allergic outcomes in infants with hereditary risk.

Clinical studies supported by immunological data indicate early life intervention strategies to be promising in reducing the growing global burden of food allergies. The events that predispose to food allergy, including the induction of allergen-specific immune responses, appear to be initiated early in development.

The dramatic increase in the prevalence of allergic disease in recent decades reflects environmental and behavioural changes that have altered patterns of early immune development. The very early onset of allergic diseases points to the specific vulnerability of the developing immune system to environmental changes and the development of primary intervention strategies is crucial to address this unparalleled burden.

Debbie Susan Palmer Prescott BSc BND PhD MBBS BMedSci PhD FRACP Head, Nutrition in Early Life Honorary Research Fellow debbie.palmer@uwa.edu.au

Previous reports suggested that food proteins present in human milk (HM) may trigger symptoms in allergic children during breastfeeding, but existing evidence has never been reviewed systematically.

Associations between the human gut microbiome and health outcomes continues to be of great interest, although fecal sample collection methods which impact microbiome studies are sometimes neglected. Here, we expand on previous work in sample optimization, to promote high quality microbiome data. To compare fecal sample collection methods, amplicons from the bacterial 16S rRNA gene (V4) and fungal (ITS2) region, as well as short chain fatty acid (SCFA) concentrations were determined in fecal material over three timepoints.