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A remote hunting lodge on a volcanic outcrop off Iceland’s south coast, dubbed the “Loneliest House in the World” on social media, has been fitted with its first solar-charged battery power, reducing its reliance on propane and petrol generators. Blanch Ancla has more.

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Lee Colker powered on an iPad in the basement of his Pittsburgh home and logged into a virtual exercise session with Olivia Masten, a trainer who specializes in working with cancer patients.

Mr. Colker, 66, had been dealing with unpredictable fatigue and brain fog since beginning a clinical trial for metastatic kidney cancer this year. When staff at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center told him an exercise program could improve his energy, he jumped at the opportunity. “That was a clincher for me,” he said.

The program is part of a growing effort around the country to help cancer patients exercise, as the benefits of doing so become increasingly clear.

Observational research has long suggested that exercise improves cancer survival, particularly for breast cancer patients. Last year, a landmark randomized controlled trial showed that colon cancer patients who participated in a structured exercise program with a trainer-coach over three years were less likely to see their cancers come back and had a better quality of life. Among those in the program, 90 percent were alive after eight years, compared with 83 percent in the control group.

A later study showed the program, which altogether cost $3,000 per person, also saved the health system money — “a home run,” said Dr. Scott Ramsey, a cancer researcher and health economist at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Washington State.

That combination of benefits is rare among cancer therapies: The new pancreatic cancer drug daraxonrasib, for example, costs $480,000 annually, has unpleasant side effects and, while it prolongs life by several months, does not increase overall long-term survival.

“If we had a drug with this magnitude of benefit, it would immediately become standard of care and funded” by insurance companies, said Dr. Christopher Booth, an oncologist and professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the leader of the exercise trial.

While guidelines now recommend that oncologists help colon cancer patients achieve at least 150 minutes of moderate to rigorous exercise per week, many patients need support in the form of a structured program, with a trainer and supervised sessions, to get to that level and stick with it. But there’s not yet an insurance pathway to pay for such programs — a major barrier to rolling them out more widely.“You can tell patients that if you do this, you may survive longer,” Dr. Ramsey said. But unfortunately, he added, “we just don’t have the infrastructure.”

Current programs are largely limited to major cancer centers and dependent on philanthropy or individual out-of-pocket payments to cover costs, leaving poorer patients and those who live far from these centers without access.

Dr. Jeff Meyerhardt, a gastrointestinal oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, refers his patients to the hospital’s center for alternative therapies, where they can consult with a trainer and access in-person and online exercise classes. But the trainer can’t continue supporting patients over time.

At the University of California, San Francisco, doctors refer eligible patients for physical therapy and rehabilitation, which can be reimbursed by insurance, while many Y.M.C.A. branches offer a free or low-cost 12-week program for cancer survivors.

Improving outcomes among cancer patients isn’t as simple as telling them to exercise more, said Kathryn Schmitz, an exercise oncology researcher at U.P.M.C. Hillman Cancer Center. “Exercise is not just biology,” she said. “It is also behavior.”

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Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

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When you fall asleep, your brain doesn’t just switch off. As the cognitive lights go out, housekeeping begins. Along the outer walls of blood vessels, microscopic currents flow, sweeping away waste that would otherwise cause harm.

This is the glymphatic system, a network of channels that helps the brain clear unwanted proteins and by-products of cellular metabolism. It may explain one of life’s most familiar pleasures: feeling refreshed after a good night’s sleep. Yet we only learned of its existence in 2012, and ever since, researchers have been scrambling to figure out exactly how it works.

Now, it seems this overlooked system may be crucial for our health – when clearance falters, it may contribute to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and possibly other hard-to-treat conditions, including migraine.

Doctors are eager to intervene, wondering whether boosting this nocturnal detox could slow or even prevent disease. “The field is filled with promise, and we’re just starting to do the studies that will find out if it’s going to make good on that promise,” says neuroscientist Jeffrey Iliff at the University of Washington in Seattle. Experiments range from using drugs and red-light therapy to inhaling bursts of carbon dioxide. There’s also talk of improving brain clearance by changing how we exercise or breathe, or even the position in which we sleep. Meanwhile, emerging techniques hint that we might already be able to gauge the health of our glymphatic system using a simple smartwatch.

Yet the young field has already been dogged by disputed methods, exaggerated headlines and the apparent detention of a key researcher. With so much at stake, it is vital to separate promise from hype, establishing what we can reliably measure, which interventions help clear the waste and whether doing so improves our health and prevents disease.

All our cells produce unwanted chemicals that become harmful if they build up. Luckily, we have an elaborate network of tubes called the lymphatic system that runs throughout the body, collecting fluid from cells, filtering it and sending it to the blood, with waste being expelled by the liver and kidneys.

The strange thing is that there are no lymph vessels in the brain. The implication was that the brain’s waste molecules left passively, drifting through the extracellular fluid surrounding brain cells. But this never made much sense for such an energy-hungry – and therefore heavily waste-creating – organ.

A breakthrough came in 2012, when Iliff and his colleagues injected a fluorescent tracer into the brains of living mice. They targeted the subarachnoid space, a thin region between two of the membranes, or meninges, that encase the brain and spinal cord. The tracers rapidly moved from this space into the brain itself. But they didn’t travel through tubes to do so. Instead, they moved along the outside of small arteries, later leaving the brain along the outer layers of small veins. The brain, it turned out, had a waste-disposal system after all – but it was unlike anything we had seen before.

Closer inspection showed that brain cells called astrocytes, which have long, branch-like projections called endfeet, were wrapped around the blood vessels. The tracer chemicals were moving in the narrow space between the astrocyte endfeet and the outer walls of the blood vessels.

Astrocytes belong to a larger group of brain cells called glial cells, inspiring the name glial lymphatic system, or glymphatic system for short.

Three years later, two groups discovered lymph vessels hidden in the meninges. Another part of the puzzle fell into place: the glymphatic system moves waste out of brain tissue, while the newly discovered lymph vessels take it away from there.

Mapping the glymphatic system was only the start, though: researchers also wanted to know what governs its flow. One vital clue came from the activity that occupies a third of our lives.

Why sleep is key to cleaning the brain

In 2013, Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester in New York state and her team, which included Iliff, injected a green tracer into the cerebrospinal fluid of sleeping mice and watched it stream around the brain. After the mice were gently woken, this flow fell by about 95 per cent. The researchers also showed that beta-amyloid, a key waste product associated with Alzheimer’s disease, was cleared roughly twice as fast when the mice were asleep.

Then last year, Natalie Hauglund, a sleep scientist now at the University of Oxford, and her colleagues helped identify a control mechanism. Studying mice, they showed that concentrations of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline rose and fell about every 50 seconds during non-REM sleep. This caused arteries in the brain to alternately swell and constrict, gently pumping the fluid along the outside.

That mechanism could be key to why glymphatic function declines with age. “As you get older, your arteries become stiffer,” says Roslyn Bill at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. “So, I think that whole mechanism probably breaks down.”

Crucially, Geir Ringstad and Per Kristian Eide at the University of Oslo in Norway demonstrated that the glymphatic system also operates similarly in the human brain and that just one night without sleep is enough to reduce the removal of a tracer from people’s brains.

This was one of the first hints that the glymphatic system can go wrong overnight, but what happens when the brain’s housekeeping falters over months or years?

The strongest links between a faulty glymphatic system and disease concern Alzheimer’s. In people with this form of dementia, beta-amyloid accumulates into distinctive plaques, while abnormal tangles of another protein called tau form inside brain cells.

In 2016, researchers including Nedergaard found there was reduced glymphatic transport in mouse models of Alzheimer’s even before amyloid plaques formed. The implication was that impaired glymphatic clearance might allow beta-amyloid to accumulate in the brain, contributing to disease. Since then, evidence has grown that the glymphatic system transports these proteins in people too – this January, Iliff and his colleagues reported that it helps clear beta-amyloid and tau from the brains of people without dementia.

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Chris Gash

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that also wasn’t at the Hawks game in February 2024. That’s another misunderstanding: We were hawking game, as we like to make a little cash on the side selling rare meats.

How much politics happened this week? We’ll put it like this: On a scale from 1 to 10, it was a … 5.5 or 6, probably. Both chambers of Congress have departed D.C. through Election Day, which means they have to spend more time with their annoying constituents and their incessant, whiny demands. Hang in there, candidates.

We’ve already made fun of Eric Schmitt in this edition, and we will continue to do so later on, because it’s rare that someone is caught so red-handed being a dope. Plus, we look at Donald Trump’s campaign travel schedule, which is light on places where there are competitive campaigns and heavy on the few pockets of the country where he can rest assured crowds will be nice to him.

But first, the polls. They have reached such a point of goodness for Democrats that we are compelled to ask: Is something fishy going on?

What matters now: Are the polls for Democrats too good to be true?

Last week, we wrote about how the situation was becoming so dire for Republicans that they were hustling to defend states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. We instantly felt ashamed of ourselves. A core mission of this newsletter is to accelerate debilitating and unproductive anxiety in Democratic readers, not to make them optimistic.

So in this edition, after another week of Democratic candidates showing double-digit leads in generic ballot polling and posting more whopping leads in every battleground across the map, we’re exploring a more on-brand topic: What if the polls are overstating Democrats’ position?

We asked veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake if any red flags jumped out at her from the public polls showing Democrats essentially leading every race across the country by 100-point margins. She mentioned two things.

First, that “these polls assume young people are going to turn out at record-high levels,” but that “I haven’t seen enough investment to make sure that’s true.” Young people have moved sharply away from Trump since 2024, which makes sense: The biggest issue in the country is the cost of living, and young people have no money. And young people could turn out at record levels. But expecting young people to turn out at record levels is a famously risky proposition in electoral politics.

Second, she said, was that most of these polls show “depressed Republican turnout,” a problem that Republicans—who have a serious financial advantage over Democrats this cycle—are spending unlimited sums of cash to amend.

In sum: These recent, dramatic numbers are “driven by two things: a blue surge and a red drag,” she said. “And I think both may be overestimated.”

When polling has underestimated Republican energy in the Trump era, there’s a common cause: Pollsters aren’t successfully reaching enough white non-college voters relative to college-plus voters. Since red states like Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas have relatively higher numbers of white non-college voters, the error there will be greater if pollsters are missing this cohort again.

Odder yet is how Democrats’ vast improvement in red states hasn’t been met with a similar polling surge(™) by Democratic Senate candidates in certain blue states, like Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota or Chris Pappas in New Hampshire.

“I just see warning signs of that with this idea that it looks like the Republicans are running stronger in the blue states, the Democrats are running stronger in the red states, and I tend to think that just doesn’t materialize,” Patrick Ruffini, the Republican pollster and founding partner of Echelon Insights, told us. “The fundamentals are going to end up mattering a lot more than we are maybe thinking right now.”

The polls aren’t directionally wrong. The president has a 38 percent approval rating, and voters think both he and the economy suck. It’s just a question of how good a Democratic year it will be after Republicans spend a billion dollars this month arguing that Democrats are communists who want to turn boys into girls. Ruffini’s latest poll, for example, had Democrats leading the generic ballot by 8 points. In a world like that, Democrats retake the House, flip a North Carolina Senate seat and maybe one or two more, but fall a few points short in various red-state Senate seats that Democrats began to fantasize about around Labor Day. That’s an outcome many Democrats would have locked in if they were asked a year ago. But it’s one that may come as a disappointment after the pollsters—those teases—got their hopes up about, like, Kansas.

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Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash, Brandon Bell/Getty Images, Sarah Rice/Getty Images, Vasyl Helevachuk/Getty Imges Plus, and tanarch/Adobe Stock.

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It’s a turbulent time for Trumpism. President Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and congressional Republicans have left Washington for their districts showing greater alarm over their chances in the upcoming midterm elections.

Have the strains of Trump 2.0 taken any wind out of the sails of the populist right — and will they prompt a reconsideration of what it means to be a conservative?

Stephanie Slade, the author of “Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue and the Future of the American Right,” explored those questions in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.

John Guida: With the political fortunes of Trump and the G.O.P. looking shaky, at least for the moment, are you hearing concerns or doubts about Trumpism itself or the direction of conservatism from conservatives?

Stephanie Slade: Oh, yes. I’ll give you two examples. As I speak with conservative voters, including some who cast votes for Trump in three elections in a row, I’m increasingly hearing them say they feel betrayed — over his war of choice in the Middle East, over his reluctance to release the Epstein files, over his administration’s apparent focus on anything and everything but people’s No. 1 priority of bringing down the cost of living. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his base would stand by him, but I think that’s finally starting to change, at least on the margin.

The second thing I would point you to is the exodus last winter of scholars, donors and board members from the Heritage Foundation. When the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, proudly defended Tucker Carlson after Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes for a chummy interview, a number of conservatives suddenly awoke to the ideological extremism and moral rot that had taken root on parts of the right, and many people showed fairly decisively that, however they may feel about Trump, they wanted nothing to do with groyperism.

Guida: Do you see these developments as a sign that conservatives are retreating from some of the commitments of Trumpism — like, say, tariffs — or are they just disappointed with Trump himself?

Slade: There’s a dawning recognition that Trump the man is an unreliable ally. He will say one thing on the campaign trail — no new wars! — but not feel the slightest bit constrained by his promises while in office. Another thing is the self-dealing: the genuine corruption of historic proportions in which the president’s powers are being abused to enrich his allies and family members, sometimes at taxpayer expense. People see that and wonder what happened to draining the swamp?

Guida: This week, some intellectuals of the populist right — the New Right, or as you call it, the Dissident Right — are meeting at the National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem. At the first edition of these gatherings, in Washington in 2019, the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony declared an “independence day” from many conservative predecessors and principles. Does the decline in Trump’s standing, even at the margins, have any impact on the broader national conservative project?

Slade: Many self-described national conservatives, including Hazony and the aforementioned Kevin Roberts, bet all their chips on Trump and Trumpism as the future of the conservative movement. That bet looks at the very least more questionable now. Polling suggests that the American people do not believe the MAGA agenda is delivering for them. This is going to be a definite challenge for the folks who have turned their whole intellectual and institutional purpose to the promotion of what I call “will-to-power politics” on the theory that this is what voters really want.

Guida: What is will-to-power politics?

Slade: It’s an approach that sees politics as purely a war to determine which side will get to wield power to reward its friends and punish its enemies. On the right, it explicitly repudiates the old-school Reagan-style commitment to limited government and free markets and instead calls on conservatives to be more “muscular” and less squeamish about using the coercive power of the state to enact their values and their conception of the common good.

At the end of the day, hatred toward the opposition is treated as a virtue. The goal, above all, is to defeat and destroy the other side rather than try to figure out how to coexist peacefully in a diverse society of 342 million people.

Guida: You have argued for a different path for conservatism — related presumably to the Reaganite approach — in which Republicans rediscover fusionism, a philosophy that emerged in the postwar years and prevailed on the right until the emergence of Trumpism. What is fusionism?

Slade: It’s the idea that both liberty and virtue are necessary for human flourishing. Mid-century fusionists argued that the American founding represented a synthesis of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, with its lessons about the habits and choices that lead to a fulfilling life, and what we would eventually come to call the classical liberal political tradition, with its commitments to individual rights, the rule of law and so forth. Until about a decade ago, this was more or less a consensus position on the American right. But that consensus has now broken down.

Guida: So it’s a synthesis of what you call virtue (the moral tradition) and liberty, or freedom. A citizen needs to know how to live virtuously with that personal freedom. You need both.

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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The distinct, earthy smell that fills the air after rain following a long dry spell can trigger some serious nostalgia. This scent, petrichor, goes right to our brain’s memory and emotional centers for reasons that may be to do with our very evolution. But as climate change alters Earth’s weather and environment, petrichor is going to transform, too.

First, it helps to know why petrichor even happens. During dry periods, soil-dwelling bacteria produce a compound called geosmin that deters insects such as fruit flies. The chemical signals to the flies that the plant material the bacteria grow on isn’t appetizing and that it might be toxic. Geosmin also attracts spore-spreading animals, such as springtails, which help disperse the compound even more widely.

“Humans are extremely sensitive to geosmin,” says Johan Lundström, a psychologist specializing in olfactory perception at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “If there was one drop of geosmin stirred up into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, we’d still smell it.”

While bacteria in soil produce geosmin, plants discharge aromatic oils during a drought to create a shield to protect against harsh heat and minimize water loss. When raindrops hit dry ground and plants, the impact creates microscopic bubbles filled with geosmin and oils that rise into the air, pop and scatter into tiny particles that can then fill human nostrils.

Exactly how petrichor changes will depend on where you are as the effects of rising global temperatures on weather and climate patterns will vary from place to place and year to year. Overall, parts of the world that get more rainfall will experience less petrichor, whereas areas that have droughts will experience more, says Jeppe Lund Nielsen, a professor of microbial physiology at Aalborg University in Denmark.

Droughts cause geosmin to build up, and when they occur with hotter temperatures, bacteria produce even more geosmin as heat speeds up chemical reactions inside the microbes. “If you get a higher temperature, you also get a higher production of the compounds,” Nielsen says. So when it finally does rain, more geosmin is released. But if soils get too dry, “the geosmin will dry up and not be released,” Lundström says.

Where rain falls more frequently, there will be less petrichor because the aromatic compounds won’t have enough time to accumulate. And heavy downpours—which are increasing as the planet warms—are too forceful to trap the tiny air bubbles required to launch the scent into the air. Instead the compounds are diluted, pushed underground or mixed in surface floodwaters.

Soil degradation—which has also increased as a result of higher temperatures and heavier downpours—plays a role, too, because it means fewer geosmin-producing bacteria can grow.

Any changes to geosmin won’t stop at what humans smell. Insects that react to petrichor will also have to adjust their behavior, Nielsen says. For example, areas with large amounts of petrichor will likely see an increase in mosquitoes, because the smell indicates to these insects that the dry ground is now a moist fertile environment in which to lay their eggs.

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The iPhone 18 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Google Pixel 11 Pro are among the best phones you can buy right now in 2026. They have a whole bunch in common from their blistering processors to their top-notch photography skills. Throw in their big, vibrant displays and of course their slew of AI tricks nobody asked for and it’s no surprise that these flagships have something else in common: whopping price tags. 

Even before the component shortage putting one of these phones in your pocket meant parting with a huge amount of cash but the scarcity of RAM and flash memory is driving up costs of all electronics, with phones being no exception. If we look at foldable phones then those prices get even more eye-watering with the iPhone Duo costing up to $3,199. Ouch.

When top phones already cost $1,000 or more, any price increase is going to sting so it’s never been more important to make every penny count.

Thankfully, there’s a huge array of options out there catering to all needs and budgets, whether you’re looking for a top-end model packing cutting-edge tech or a more affordable option for everyday use like the Pixel 10A or Nothing Phone 4A Pro. 

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Have you seen this?

It’s one in a slew of pro-Trump ads that has been airing since last Wednesday. Set to the song “Love Me” by the singer-songwriter JMSN, the roughly 30-second spot shows a rapid progression of pictures and video of President Trump, as he touts his accomplishments and denounces “communism, socialism and Marxism.” As it ends, you are informed that it was “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

Trump is deeply unpopular and running strange, propagandistic advertisements is not likely to change that fact. But the wisdom of the campaign notwithstanding, the real problem with this is more legal than political. It is against the law to use taxpayer dollars for propaganda and explicitly partisan purposes.

“This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “It is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it. It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns.”

In a news release, The White House wrote that the ad is a public service announcement, “a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad.” For his part, President Trump — who personally directed the chief of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to use taxpayer funds for the ad campaign — says “these are ads for the country.” “I’m not promoting a candidate,” he added. “I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.”

But unlike a public service announcement, this ad — and others like it — aren’t promoting a government program or service. They exist to glorify President Trump: to love him, as the song suggests.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer who served under President George W. Bush, gave The Associated Press a blunt assessment of the advertising campaign. “You watch all three ads, they’re sheer propaganda,” he said, adding that “This is increasingly looking like what authoritarian governments do to promote their leaders.”

Compared with the money used to build the president’s ballroom, this is not an expensive campaign. So far, the White House has spent about $5.5 million of a $20 million contract to produce and promote its pro-Trump propaganda. But again, it is less the cost than the fact that the president is showing his deep contempt for a fundamental norm of American democracy: We don’t use government to glorify our political leaders, at least not while they’re alive.

If future Americans want to vote to memorialize or otherwise praise past leaders, that is up to them. But it is not the place of the president to issue propaganda on his behalf, with money taken from the public till.

It is not clear that Democrats have the appetite to impeach Trump for a third time. Even if they did, there is almost no chance that they would have the votes to convict and remove him from office. And yet, this is exactly the type of offense that demands a response from the legislature. A president that shows this much contempt for the republican character of the American system — who seeks, at every opportunity, to set himself up as a strongman over the entire nation — is a president who must be sanctioned by the people’s representatives.

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Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times

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Babies who have a strong immune reaction in the first week of life seem to have triple the risk of developing an allergy or eczema by age 1, compared with those who don’t. But the long-term impact of this early immune response, now defined for the first time, seems to be modulated by the microbiome and how babies are fed.

“If you ask 100 immunologists, they would say that immune development begins at birth and continuously develops over time, without discrete phases,” says Petter Brodin at Imperial College London.

But at a talk at an immune conference in London earlier this month, Brodin challenged this idea. He revealed that he and his colleagues have found that if a baby has a strong immune response in the first week of life, this seems to have an oversized impact on how the infant’s immune system subsequently develops. “That’s a novel concept,” he said during the talk.

In ongoing research, Brodin and his colleagues have been studying nearly 600 infants in Sweden, collecting and analysing blood and stool samples from the infants throughout their first year of life. The analysis revealed that about half the babies had what the researchers termed a strong “seeding” immune reaction during the first week of life, marked by high levels of inflammatory molecules such as interferon gamma, which activates immune cells. The remaining infants had lower levels of these inflammatory molecules during the first week, which the team called a weak seeding reaction.

Further analysis revealed that babies with a strong seeding reaction had substantially more Bacteroides bacteria in their gut than those who had a weak reaction. “A high abundance of Bacteroides bacteria seems to drive seeding reactions to be very strong,” says Brodin – although it is also possible that the variation in levels of the bacteria actually resulted from differences in the severity of the seeding reaction. Babies can pick up these bacteria via interactions with their mother and family members, he says.

The researchers think the effects of the seeding reaction last for only about a week at the beginning of life because that is when the gut is especially leaky, enabling bacteria like Bacteroides to enter the bloodstream and activate immune cells. “Healthy infants are born with a leaky gut that closes up after about a week,” says Brodin.

But the seeding reaction may have lasting effects: by sifting through the infants’ medical records, the researchers found that 39 per cent of those with a strong seeding reaction developed either eczema or a food allergy by age 1. In contrast, just 12 per cent of infants with a weak seeding reaction developed at least one of these conditions, which are caused by excessive inflammation. “What we ideally want is a weak seeding reaction,” says Brodin.

Further analysis revealed that the infants with a strong reaction then followed one of three immune trajectories linked to two main factors: whether they were primarily fed breast or formula milk, and the abundance of bifidobacteria in their gut.

For instance, 50 per cent of babies who had a strong seeding reaction and were breastfed – but had low levels of bifidobacteria – developed eczema or food allergies. Breastfed infants who had a strong seeding reaction and had high bifidobacteria levels were less likely to develop eczema or food allergies, with 25 per cent of them doing so.

The researchers also found that 33 per cent of infants who had a strong seeding reaction and were fed formula milk developed eczema or an allergy by age 1. In the work presented at the conference, the team didn’t give details of bifidobacteria levels in the guts of these formula-fed babies.

Brodin says the bifidobacteria may be important because they break down certain sugars in breast milk, known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), to produce anti-inflammatory molecules called short-chain fatty acids. In turn, these can prevent the immune system from overreacting, he says. The researchers plan to explore why exactly the other links may have emerged in future research, says Brodin.

“This is a really important piece of work. Only a few studies have looked at immune development during the first week after birth,” says Lucy Crouch at the University of Birmingham in the UK. The research could reveal ways to develop personalised medicine for infants, she says.

For instance, you could imagine measuring whether a baby has a strong or weak seeding reaction, then, depending on whether they are breastfed or not and their levels of bifidobacteria, you could give them a probiotic that boosts these microbes to cut their allergy or eczema risk, she says.

But further research is needed to establish whether the seeding reaction has effects beyond the first year, says Crouch. Studies should also explore whether the links made in the study really are causal, she says, which could be done by tracking how immune cells within gut organoids – clumps of lab-grown cells that are used to mimic the intestines – react to bacteria in the presence or absence of HMOs.

“The reported differences in allergy and eczema risk are striking, but they show associations rather than demonstrating that particular microbes or immune responses directly cause the later outcomes,” says Lindsay Hall, also at the University of Birmingham.

For now, parents shouldn’t alter how they feed or interact with their infants based on the results. “It is much too early to suggest that the findings should change advice to parents,” says Hall.

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Hope you find these recipes useful!

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Click the link below for 20 recipes presented 1 by 1 for your pleasure! There is a option to save the 20 recipes. 

1 of 20 Recipes

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