Alba Health offers a wellness-focused approach to understanding your child's gut health and providing tailored recommendations for their well-being. It is not intended for medical diagnosis or treatment.
Who is Alba for?
Learn how to optimize your child's nutrition for optimal gut health
Learn how you can start now to optimize your child’s health during the first 1,000 days and feel the good effects for life.
Learn how to support your child's gut after antibiotics or C-section
Antibiotics & C-section are often associated to a disrupted gut microbiome and to health conditions later in life.
Discover if the probiotics you are giving your child are right for them
There are many different probiotics out there, and not all have the same effect. Find out if you are using the right one.
Hear from parents like you
★★★★★
My son's eczema has cleared
My son was suffering from mild eczema that kept re-appearing all over his torso, back and legs. When he was 1.5 years old he got sick and had to take antibiotics, and right after he had a big eczema flare. I found Alba on Instagram around that time and I am so glad for this. The test was simple and the customer service merits 10 stars. The report I received while very scientific was very easy to read and a clear action plan was recommended. It's been 3 months now since I made those changes and he has not had a single flare.
Anonymous
Verified Alba Health user
★★★★★
Highly recommend for parents
Our son was born premature, and received a lot of antibiotics. In the few months that followed we had some feeding issues (not gaining weight) and he was also fussy and crying.The procedure is really easy: send in some stool with the toolkit. We got the results fast and the meeting with expert was very helpful. The results were explained and we got useful advice. For us as new parents this has been very helpful. It was especially important to us that this was not some advice but it was based on scientific evidence.
Lisette
Verified Alba Health user
★★★★★
Eye opening and positive experience
As first time parents we try to be aware (maybe even in control) of everything related to our baby. We initially thought Alba will just help us fulfill this need of ours a bit by providing us with more information we can use to raise a baby with a healthy gut. But this experience turned out to be more than that. "..." The report we received, while very informative and rigorous on the scientific data, still managed to be easy to put into practice through the recommendations and recipes it pointed to.
Laurentiu
Verified Alba Health user
★★★★★
Why 5? The amazing service and concrete advice!
The service is simply amazing. Initially I was a bit sceptical to what we could learn from doing this but the service absolutely amazing and we got concrete advice on changes we could make and things to look out for!
Adam
Verified Alba Health user
★★★★★
Recommended for parents
This is a legit service. You get a test kit, take a sample, and send it in. The process was pretty simple. After some time, you receive a test report, which was very interesting and helpful for adjusting our baby's diet. Definitely a cool idea for parents!
R.G.
Verified Alba Health user
★★★★★
I want to know everything related to my son
Alba explains the WHY behind the way my son's gut microbiome looks and provides simple actions that I can easily manage in everyday life.
Rebecka
Verified Alba Health user
★★★★★
I have worked in the microbiome for ...
I have worked in the microbiome for almost a decade and I was really impressed with the results and insights that I got about my child's microbiome through Alba Health. My child had received a probiotic months before we sent in the sample and they were able to detect it in the sample. I can highly recommend Alba Health if you are looking to know more about your child's microbiome health and development.
Pernille
Verified Alba Health user
We bring world-leading science to your family
Our team has more than 1600+ scientific publications
At Alba Health, we’re dedicated to supporting your child's health by collaborating with top pediatricians, gastroenterologists, nutritionists, and researchers who make up our esteemed scientific advisory board. Together, they have over 1,600 scientific publications combined. Our Scientific Co-founder, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Willem M. de Vos, is a world-renowned expert in the microbiome field with over 800 publications. He co-leads the HELMi Cohort, one of the largest and most comprehensive studies on child gut health. You can feel confident knowing that your child's well-being is being guided by top experts in the field.
Learn more about or scientific advisory board here.
University of Helsinki
We collaborate with the world's largest study
We have a collaboration with the University of Helsinki’s Health and Early Life Microbiota (HELMi) cohort, a world-leading research initiative focused on child health. This groundbreaking study explores the connection between gut health, lifestyle, and overall health outcomes, analyzing over 10,000 microbiome samples and 50,000 lifestyle data points. This collaboration allows us to uncover essential and unique insights that help you on your journey to support your child’s wellbeing.
Learn more about HELMi here.
Uppsala University
COPSAC
University of Antwerpen
We pioneer the largest study on child health in Sweden
Our aim is to provide you with new valuable insights and actionable recommendations. That’s why we launched our own study, the PREVENT study – the largest company-led study of its kind, in partnership with Uppsala University, Universiteit Antwerpen, and COPSAC. With over 300 families participating, the aim with the study is to connect the gut microbiome to top concerns for parents like crying, sleep, digestion and eventually - health symptoms. By doing this, we want to provide genuine and distinctive benefits to you as a parent, assisting you in promoting the long-term well-being and healthful development of their baby.
Read more about our study here.
FAQ
Currently, Alba is for children 0-3 years old. The gut microbiome develops greatly in the first years of life; it starts to develop at birth and it reaches a unique composition over time. That means that the gut microbiome needs to be analysed differently depending on the age: what looks "common" at 1 year old does not necessarily look common at a later age.
Alba helps you discover your child's microbiome in relation to their specific age.Alba Health is the first and only company in this space to have a proprietary study (the PREVENT Study) collecting gut microbiome samples from children over time, to plot gut microbiome development over time.
We are working hard to expand age ranges and be able to offer Alba for children up to 18 years old! Sign up to our waiting list and be the first to know when we expand our test's age range.
We are inhabited by 39 trillions of microorganisms that live on our skin, mouth, genitals, respiratory tract and gut. They are bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites and they are essential for our health - in fact, we couldn’t survive without them! The gut microbiome is the collection of all of our microbes in the gut, and their DNA. It has a fundamental role in digestion, immune system health and brain health. Imbalances in the gut microbiome have been associated with most chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, asthma, celiac disease and even cancer.
References: Ghosh, T.S., Shanahan, F. & O’Toole, P.W. The gut microbiome as a modulator of healthy ageing. Nat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol (2022); Vijay, A., Valdes, A.M. Role of the gut microbiome in chronic diseases: a narrative review. Eur J Clin Nutr 76, 489–501 (2022).
During pregnancy, the mother’s gut microbiome changes drastically, until birth. It is closely related to her own as well as to the baby’s health and it is thought to help:
- Maintain a healthy pregnancy: Imbalances in the gut microbiome have been associated with complications such as gestational diabetes, obesity, preeclampsia, digestive disorders, and autoimmune diseases.
- Promote the baby’s healthy development, especially their immune system and brain. Several animal studies have shown that the expecting mother’s gut bacteria produce compounds that might help educate the baby’s immune system and promote neurodevelopment;
- Prepare the gut microbiome transfer from the mother to the baby at birth, which lays the foundations of lifelong health. During a vaginal birth, the baby gets covered in the mother’s microbes, and that is a good thing! Those microbes are the first colonizers of the baby’s gut and will form the baby’s microbiome.
References: Turjeman, S., Collado, M. C., Koren, O. The Gut Microbiome in Pregnancy and Pregnancy Complications. Curr. Opin. Endocrine. Metab. Res. (2021); Yao Y., Cai X., Chen C., Fang H., Zhao Y., Fei W., Chen F. & Zheng C.. The Role of Microbiomes in Pregnant Women and Offspring: Research Progress of Recent Years. Front. Pharmacol. (2020).
The microbiome we have in the first years of life has a major influence on our development and on our long-term health. In fact, scientists have found that imbalances in the early-life gut microbiome predisposes children to diseases in early and later life. Such imbalances are associated to colic, asthma, eczema, diabetes, allergic diseases, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders.
Gut microbes and lifestyle in the first 1000 days of life are particularly important because the foundations of metabolism, immune system and brain health develop in this critical time window.
References: Linehan, K., Dempsey, E., Ryan, A. C., Ross, R., Stanton, C. First encounters of the microbial kind: perinatal factors direct infant gut microbiome establishment. Microbiome Research Reports (2022); Sarkar, A., Yoo, J.Y., Valeria Ozorio Dutra, S., Morgan, K.H., Groer, M. The Association between Early-Life Gut Microbiota and Long-Term Health and Diseases. J Clin Med. (2021); Robertson, Ruairi, C., Manges, A., Finlay, B., Prendergast, A. The Human Microbiome and Child Growth – First 1000 Days and Beyond. Trends in Microbiology (2019).
From a stool sample, we are able to collect the DNA of all gut microbes . From their DNA we can tell exactly which bacteria are present and what they are doing in your gut.
We analyze bacterial DNA only and we do not analyze your own DNA!
In children, it depends on the age. The baby's microbiome is constantly evolving from birth to adulthood, so monitoring its trajectory and development over time is even more informative than looking at only one snapshot.
- From one microbiome test, you will discover:
- Share of friendly bacteria, promoting healthy development
- Share of unfriendly bacteria, as some types of bacteria are known to be unfriendly when in large share, being able to cause infections and inhibit friendly bacteria
- Gut microbiome development, as the rate at which the microbiome matures is important for growth
- Share of bacteria protective to the immune system
- Share of bacteria producing important metabolites such as butyrate
- Ability to maintain a healthy gut barrier function
- Ability to metabolize vitamins, proteins and lipids
- Associations to crying, fussing, and BMI later in life.
Most importantly, you will receive a set of personalized recommendations covering diet, personal care products, environmental exposure and supplements (if needed) reviewed by our medical experts and discussed with you in a 1:1 consultation with a certified Nutrition & Health Coach
.
References: Stewart CJ, Ajami NJ, O'Brien JL, Hutchinson DS, Smith DP, Wong MC, Ross MC, Lloyd RE, Doddapaneni H, Metcalf GA, Muzny D, Gibbs RA, Vatanen T, Huttenhower C, Xavier RJ, Rewers M, Hagopian W, Toppari J, Ziegler AG, She JX, Akolkar B, Lernmark A, Hyoty H, Vehik K, Krischer JP, Petrosino JF. Temporal development of the gut microbiome in early childhood from the TEDDY study. Nature (2018);
Yes! The microbiome is dynamic and we can influence it with relatively simple and low-risk lifestyle changes. The microbiome is a very small community of microorganisms at birth and it develops massively in the first years of life. Over the years, the microbiome "settles" on a unique composition that we will maintain throughout adulthood (although it is possible to change our microbiome as adults too!).
Factors that affect the baby's gut microbiome (and that can be changed) are:
- Mother's diet during pregnancy
- Mother's gut microbiome at birth
- Type of birth (vaginal /C-section, at home / in hospital, medicated, etc.)
- Breastfeeding and breast milk composition
- Duration of breastfeeding
- Mother's diet while breastfeeding
- Infant formula and type of infant formula (if used)
- Use of antibiotics and type of antibiotic used
- Use of othermedications
- Evidence-backed probiotics
- Evidence-backed prebiotics and fibers
- Vitamin D and other supplements
- Baby's diet (especially quantity and diversity fibers)
- Timing of weaning
- Exposure to nature and furry pets
- Home environment
- Exposure to household cleaning and personal care products
- Exposure to anti-microbial products e.g., hand sanitizers
- Exercise and movement- Viral infections
- Stress
References: Wong, E., Lui, K., Day, A., Leach, S. Manipulating the Neonatal Gut Microbiome: Current Understanding and Future Perspectives. Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition
(2022).
Derrien, M., Alvarez, AS., De Vos, W. The Gut Microbiota in the First Decade of Life. Trends in Microbiology (2019).
It depends on your individual situation and on your latest results. We stand for personalised recommendations and support, and part of our service is to guide you to take the most informed decision for your family's health.
Each time you test with us, you will have a 1:1 consultation with a certified Nutrition & Health Coach, who will recommend the best path for you.
We ship to all locations specified at the bottom of our webpage, and in the checkout.
Your sample data is stored in the European Union according to GDPR. Your name and address will be separated from the rest of your submitted data, so that it cannot be tracked to you. Your sample data will not be transferred outside of the European Union and is stored securely. Read our Privacy Policy.
Still have questions?
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What you get in the report (DRAFT)
1
Insights summary
A summary of your child’s gut health and how it relates to immune system development, metabolic health & brain health.
We compare your child’s results to a reference dataset of healthy kids in the same age range.
2
Action plan
Recommendations on what you can do to optimize your child’s lifestyle, based on the questionnaire and gut health test results.
Including foods to introduce & swap, supplements (if needed), environment and behavior.
3
Deep dives
A comprehensive deep dive into individual bacterias and species; including immune system, gut diversity, metabolic health & brain health.
4
Recipes
A se of recipes tailored to your child, with examples on meals with beneficial bacterias for your child gut.
Includes breakfast lunch and dinner.
5
Scientific references
We include all scientific reference on which we base your child's result on, to ensure you our results are based on the latest science.