Grant: Project Grant

Healthy growth in adolescence is an important determinant of lifelong health. In Canada, 2 million children aged 5-19 years currently have overweight or obesity, setting them on a trajectory of poor health. In fact, these children have a higher risk of developing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and mental health problems. It is thus imperative that interventions and policies are implemented during this stage of life to prevent these poor outcomes. Adolescence represents a critical stage in life, during which skeletal and brain development intersect with the completion of the gut microbiota establishment. The gut microbiota is a community of microorganisms residing within the intestinal tract and that helps the host extracting nutrients and energy from the diet. It is thus an important player in child growth and a determinant of metabolic health. Therefore, the gut microbiota is a candidate target for dietary interventions to support adolescent growth. In the past few years, we have established "MiGrowD", a study investigating the association among gut Microbiota, Growth since birth, and Diet in 8-12 years old children. MiGrowD is embedded in the TARGet Kids! cohort, a large primary-care health based network in Canada. Here, we propose to make MiGrowD longitudinal (MiGrowD-L) in order to study growth, diet and gut microbiota in children at multiple time points during adolescence. Our goal is to build evidence on diet, gut microbiota and growth in adolescence in order to inform new interventions. Towards this goal, we will identify foods that are associated with healthy growth and that support a health-compatible microbiota. We anticipate that our pipeline is potentially scalable across other Canadian communities and that our findings will be useful to inform strategies and policies to support healthy adolescent growth via the gut microbiota.