Prolonged Egg Supplement Advances Growing Child’s Growth and Gut Microbiota

Abstract

Protein-energy malnutrition still impacts children’s growth and development. We investigated the prolonged effects of egg supplementation on growth and microbiota in primary school children. For this study, 8–14-year-old students (51.5% F) in six rural schools in Thailand were randomly assigned into three groups: (1) whole egg (WE), consuming 10 additional eggs/week (n = 238) (n = 238); (2) protein substitute (PS), consuming yolk-free egg substitutes equivalent to 10 eggs/week (n = 200); and (3) control group (C, (n = 197)). The outcomes were measured at week 0, 14, and 35. At the baseline, 17% of the students were underweight, 18% were stunted, and 13% were wasted. At week 35, compared to the C group the weight and height difference increased significantly in the WE group (3.6 ± 23.5 kg, p < 0.001; 5.1 ± 23.2 cm, p < 0.001). No significant differences in weight or height were observed between the PS and C groups. Significant decreases in atherogenic lipoproteins were observed in the WE, but not in PS group. HDL-cholesterol tended to increase in the WE group (0.02 ± 0.59 mmol/L, ns). The bacterial diversity was similar among the groups. The relative abundance of Bifidobacterium increased by 1.28-fold in the WE group compared to the baseline and differential abundance analysis which indicated that Lachnospira increased and Varibaculum decreased significantly. In conclusion, prolonged whole egg supplementation is an effective intervention to improve growth, nutritional biomarkers, and gut microbiota with unaltered adverse effects on blood lipoproteins.

Asian Low-Carbohydrate Diet with Increased Whole Egg Consumption Improves Metabolic Outcomes in Metabolic Syndrome: A 52-Week Intervention Study

“…Interestingly, the Yolk-AKD group, which consumed more than 3 eggs/day, showed a tendency for increased HDL-C without affecting TC levels. This is consistent with a previous study in adults who supplemented with 1 egg/ day for 12 weeks [34] and in school-age children who supplemented with 3 eggs/day for 35 weeks [35]. It implies that egg can be a part of healthy KD as long as the diet contains is low in saturated fat and follow a good overall dietary pattern in addition to egg intake [36].…”

Egg consumption and growth in children: a meta-analysis of interventional trials

“…Likewise, total dietary energy intake was not reported in all studies and thus the lack of an effect of egg supplementation in some studies may have been masked by an overall dietary energy deficit and negative energy balance. Lastly, a limitation of our statistical analysis was that the control group in two studies (21,22) was counted twice-once in comparison with the one-egg group, and once in comparison with the two-eggs group.…”

“…The meta-analysis of the 9 interventions demonstrated that children in the egg supplementation groups had a greater increase in weight when compared to those in the control groups by 0.07 kg (95% CI: 0.01, 0.13 kg, p = 0.006; Figure 6). Three comparisons (21,22,25) were in favor of the control group, but results were not statistically significant (Figure 6). There was moderate heterogeneity across interventions (p = 0.02; I 2 = 57.0%).…”

“…Any disagreements were resolved by a third member of the research team. Later in this process, one additional study (21) was identified during an oral presentation at a scientific conference (ICN Tokyo, December 2022), and results from the final published paper were included. This resulted in 7 articles and 9 unique interventions meeting the inclusion criteria (Figure 1).…”

“…One study had a high risk of selection bias due to the non-randomized design (24). Four studies had high risk of performance bias as the participants were not blinded to the intervention, and three of the studies did not report whether participants and/or personnel were blinded, resulting in unclear risk of bias (7,12,21,22,24,25). Another study had a high (25%) dropout rate overall, which also seemed to be different among the intervention arms (22).…”