Intestinal microbes respond differently to foods with similar nutrition labels



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intestinal bacteria

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Foods that look alike on nutrition labels can have very different effects on our microbiomes, researchers report in a newspaper published June 12 in the newspaper Cell Host & Microbe. Researchers 'observations of participants' diet and stool samples over the last 17 days suggest that the correlation between what we eat and what is happening with our gut microbes may not be as simple as we thought. This adds an increased level of complexity to research focused on improving health by manipulating the microbiome.

"Nutritional labels are about people," says lead author Dan Knights of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the BioTechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota. "They do not provide much information on how the microbiome will change from one day to the other or from one person to the next."

As part of this study, investigators recruited 34 participants to record everything they ate for 17 days. Stool samples were taken daily and metagenomic rifle sequencing was performed. This allowed researchers to see at very high resolution how the microbiome of different people, as well as the enzymes and metabolic functions they act upon, was changing day by day depending on what they ate. He provided a resource for analyzing the relationships between dietary changes and how the microbiome evolves over time.

"We expected that by conducting this dense sampling (where we could see what people were eating each day and what happened to their microbiome), we would be able to correlate food nutrients with specific strains of microbes, as well as account for microbiomes between people, "says Knights. "But what we found did not correspond to the strong associations we expected, we had to scratch our heads and propose a new approach to measure and compare different foods."

The researchers observed a much closer correspondence between diet and microbiome changes when they examined the relationship between foods rather than their nutritional content. For example, two different types of leafy vegetables, such as spinach and kale, may have a similar influence on the microbiome, while another type of vegetable, such as carrot or tomato, may have an impact very different, even if the classic nutritional profiles are similar. Researchers have developed a tree structure to link food with each other and share statistical information on closely related foods.

Two people in the study consumed only Soylent, a meal substitute that is very popular with people working in the technology sector. Although it is a very small sample, the data from these participants showed that the microbiome varied from day to day, suggesting that a monotonous diet does not lead necessarily to a stable microbiome.

"The microbiome has been associated with a wide range of human conditions, including metabolic disorders, autoimmune diseases, and infections, so there is a strong motivation to manipulate the microbiome with a diet as a means of influencing it. health, "concludes Knights. "This study suggests that it's more complicated than just looking at food components like fiber and sugar." There is still a lot of research needed to understand how the full range of nutrients in foods affect how the microbiome reacts to what we eat. "


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More information:
Cell Host & MicrobeJohnson et al .: "Longitudinal longitudinal sampling reveals personalized associations between diet and microbiome." https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(19)30250-1, DOI: 10.1016 / j.chom.2019.05.005

Quote:
Intestinal microbes respond differently to foods with similar nutrition labels (June 12, 2019)
recovered on June 13, 2019
at https://phys.org/news/2019-06-gut-microbes-differently-foods-similar.html

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