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Malnutrition is extremely detrimental for children because it hinders proper development. According to a new study, researchers examined the long-term effects of malnutrition on children's gut health and discovered that even after they received proper treatment, their gut bacteria were never fully restored.

"Therapeutic food interventions have reduced mortality in children with severe acute malnutrition, but incomplete restoration of healthy growth remains a major problem," the researchers stated according to Medical Xpress.

For this study, the research team from the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and the International Center for Diarrheal Diseases Research located in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh examined 64 children between the ages of six to 20 months. All of the children were malnourished and were from the Mirpur slum of Dhaka.

The researchers gave the children two different treatments. Some of them were given Plumpy'Nut, which is an enriched peanut-based food treatment created for severe malnutrition. The other children received Khichuri-Halwa, a food treatment made mostly with rice and lentils, produced in Bangladesh. Both of the foods contained milk powder and micronutrients.

The food supplements helped the children gain weight. During treatment, the children's gut bacteria appeared to improve. However, four months after stopping treatment, the team discovered that the gut microbes of the malnourished children reverted. Gut microbes are made up of mainly bacteria that help the body digest food and produce vitamins that are essential for growth.

"Children who were undernourished had a microbial community that was immature, it... was not appropriate for their chronological age," said study co-author Jeffrey Gordon of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St Louis. "So these children are walking around with a developmental defect involving microbial cells that form an organ, a microbial organ."

The findings suggest that preventing malnutrition before it occurs is vital. The study, "Persistent gut microbiota immaturity in malnourished Bangladeshi children," was published in Nature.