Nutritional information on food labels is important to you, but do not tell much about your intestinal microbes.

It seems that every day a new study is published that links bacteria in the gut to a specific disease or health problem. The attraction of research like ours and other groups is that it may be possible to give personalized recommendations for specific foods to consume in order to move your bacteria in a direction that improves your health.

To understand how individual foods alter the bacteria that live in the human gut, collectively called the microbiome, we need to know the microscopic composition of each food we eat. But these data are not available on food labels or in current nutritional databases.

This lack of detail has been a limitation in understanding the specific relationships between a food and a microbe in humans up to now. As a dietitian and nutrition scientist, I have a long-standing interest in food and human health. When I entered a computer research lab studying the microbiome, I wanted to know if it would be possible to predict how food would alter the microbiome if we simply collected enough daily data from a group of people with a particular microbiome. normal diet.

Learn from 500 stool samples

In our recent study, published in Cell Host & Microbe, our research group studied the effect of food on the microbiome. We recruited 34 volunteers and asked them to write down everything they had eaten for 17 days and provide daily stool samples. By badyzing the microbial DNA in the stool samples, we could see which species made up their microbiome.

We found that the nutritional content of our subjects' diets – the macro and micronutrients as what is usually stated on the label of a food, such as fats, carbohydrates and sodium – did not not helped to understand microbial communities day after day.

But, when we examined the specific foods that they consumed, we could relate the food intake of our subjects to the composition of their microbiome. We think it worked because our method allowed us to use the concept of a food to capture some of the complexity of the compounds inside this food that are not generally listed. on a label.

We think it's worth noting that the effects of food were highly personalized – which means that we have seen the same species of microbes react differently to similar foods in different people.

I hope that in the near future, we can tell you with certainty which foods will change your microbiome. Overall, the science of the microbiome is not able to do so with confidence, but our recent study contributes to the achievement of this long-term goal.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.