HP and Obesity: Similar to obesity (Turnbaugh et al. 2009, Fu et al. 2015), third trimester gut microbiota showed lower α-diversity (similar to Koren et al. 2012) that was associated with increased circulating high-sensitive CRP (hs_CRP) and haptoglobin – both confirmed markers of inflammation characteristic of metabolic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cancers, etc. Reduced gut microbial diversity and richness is associated with increased adiposity and inflammatory profile (Cotillard et al. 2013, Verdam et al. 2013).