How Your Gut Microbes May Be Thwarting Your Diet
As if changing dietary habits weren’t hard enough, it turns out there
are other elements at play which slow things down: The microbes that
live inside us. A new study in the journal Cell Host & Microbe offers
some clues as to why it sometimes the body doesn’t seem to respond to
changes in eating habits in the way it “should.” It finds that the
effects of switching from a typical unhealthy American diet to a
calorie-restricted plant-based are slowed because of the stubborn
microbes that have proliferated during our prior (unhealthy) ways. More
and more research has suggested that we’re not alone when it comes to
our health. And the new study adds weight to that idea that the food
choices we make are complicated by the trillions of microbes living
inside us.
The team from Washington University in St. Louis took fecal samples from people who ate a typical American diet – processed foods, high amounts of animal protein, and fewer fruits and vegetables – and from those who ate a calorie-restricted, plant-based diet. The people in the latter group had much more diverse arrays of bacteria, some of which are known to be linked to better health. The team inoculated microbe-free mice with one or the other type of sample, so that their guts would be colonized by the respective assortments of microbes. Then they fed the mice one or the other type of diet—that is, diets that either matched or opposed the type of bacterial culture they’d been given.
It turned out that mice whose guts were colonized with an American diet didn’t respond as well to eating a plant-based diet. Their gut bacteria did shift in that direction, but it was slower to do so, which suggests that healthy eating can’t immediately overhaul a less healthy bacterial makeup.
There was another bizarre finding: When the researchers paired up mice with each other (housing a mouse with American-diet intestines with one with plant-based-diet-intestines), this actually helped things a bit. There was enough exchange of bacteria through contact that the guts of American-diet-mice shifted more quickly—which may suggest that we (if we’re like mice in this way) may also be affected by the microbes of those around us. “Humans continuously shed microorganisms; a vivid and experimentally validated image is that each individual is literally surrounded by a cloud of his/her microbes,” they write. Still, how the current study’s results apply to humans is a question that will need to be addressed more directly in future work.
Other research has certainly shown that shifts in diet can have profound effects on gut bacteria, and on our health. Last year, a study had people swap diets for just two weeks (from American to vegetable-based and vice versa), and recorded remarkable changes in their microbiomes, and even in their colon cancer risk.
And the current team’s previous research, headed by Jeffrey Gordon, has shown that the makeup of gut microbes can affect weight: Mice given gut bacteria from obese humans gained weight, even while eating low-fat mouse chow. Other studies over the past several years have linked gut microbes to everything from heart disease risk to depression.
"We have an increasing appreciation for how nutritional value and the effects of diets are impacted by a consumer's microbiota," said Gordon in a statement. "We hope that microbes identified using approaches such as those described in this study may one day be used as next-generation probiotics."
This is all to say that, because of the microbes that live in us, what we consume is not so straightforward. The gut is a bewilderingly complicated system and it’s clear from the research that we are much more than what we eat. While researchers are hashing it out, eating a plant-based diet provides well-illustrated benefits to both you and your microbes. Don’t worry too much if eating more healthily doesn’t have an immediate effect on your weight. You may have changed your diet for the better, but it may take some time for the microbes inside you to catch up.
this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.
The team from Washington University in St. Louis took fecal samples from people who ate a typical American diet – processed foods, high amounts of animal protein, and fewer fruits and vegetables – and from those who ate a calorie-restricted, plant-based diet. The people in the latter group had much more diverse arrays of bacteria, some of which are known to be linked to better health. The team inoculated microbe-free mice with one or the other type of sample, so that their guts would be colonized by the respective assortments of microbes. Then they fed the mice one or the other type of diet—that is, diets that either matched or opposed the type of bacterial culture they’d been given.
It turned out that mice whose guts were colonized with an American diet didn’t respond as well to eating a plant-based diet. Their gut bacteria did shift in that direction, but it was slower to do so, which suggests that healthy eating can’t immediately overhaul a less healthy bacterial makeup.
There was another bizarre finding: When the researchers paired up mice with each other (housing a mouse with American-diet intestines with one with plant-based-diet-intestines), this actually helped things a bit. There was enough exchange of bacteria through contact that the guts of American-diet-mice shifted more quickly—which may suggest that we (if we’re like mice in this way) may also be affected by the microbes of those around us. “Humans continuously shed microorganisms; a vivid and experimentally validated image is that each individual is literally surrounded by a cloud of his/her microbes,” they write. Still, how the current study’s results apply to humans is a question that will need to be addressed more directly in future work.
Other research has certainly shown that shifts in diet can have profound effects on gut bacteria, and on our health. Last year, a study had people swap diets for just two weeks (from American to vegetable-based and vice versa), and recorded remarkable changes in their microbiomes, and even in their colon cancer risk.
And the current team’s previous research, headed by Jeffrey Gordon, has shown that the makeup of gut microbes can affect weight: Mice given gut bacteria from obese humans gained weight, even while eating low-fat mouse chow. Other studies over the past several years have linked gut microbes to everything from heart disease risk to depression.
"We have an increasing appreciation for how nutritional value and the effects of diets are impacted by a consumer's microbiota," said Gordon in a statement. "We hope that microbes identified using approaches such as those described in this study may one day be used as next-generation probiotics."
This is all to say that, because of the microbes that live in us, what we consume is not so straightforward. The gut is a bewilderingly complicated system and it’s clear from the research that we are much more than what we eat. While researchers are hashing it out, eating a plant-based diet provides well-illustrated benefits to both you and your microbes. Don’t worry too much if eating more healthily doesn’t have an immediate effect on your weight. You may have changed your diet for the better, but it may take some time for the microbes inside you to catch up.
this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.
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