Microbiota - dietary habits

As I promised, after i finished the Autism course, i will come back to the microbiota series.

Now, the course is finished, so we will talk today about dietary habits. We all know that our diet determine what our microbiota can feed off. So, knowing this, we can change our microbiota changing our diet.

How can we do that? Easy, but you need to learn about it. You want to lose weight, you will use a calorie deficit diet, and once you reached the desired weight, you stop. This move will have a drastic effect on your microbiota, but as soon as your eating habits are back to normal, your microbiota will regulate too, because it developed a stable state over the years, and that it is not easily disturbed.

I have read about an interesting study, where they switched the diets of a population of African-Americans with that of the rural Africans. The African-Americans were given a high fibre, low fat African style diet. The rural Africans were given high fat, low fibre Western style diet. After a while, the African style diet was shown to support beneficial microbes and improved function, the Western style diet increased the risk of cancer. This research shows how short dietary changes can affect our microbiome and health.

In order to understand the long term effects of dietary habits, the researchers studied a number of individuals from different countries. People from Western world with  a diet of high protein and low fibre content tend to have more Bacteroides bacteria. People from rural Africa tend to have more Prevotella bacteria. With all the advances regarding food, we are losing our ancestral microbiome due to changes in our dietary habits and surrounding environmental factors. This can have a negative effect on health, leading to diabetes development, colon cancer, I.B.D., all of them being more prevalent in the western world.

I hope you enjoyed this new introduction. Next post will be about community types.

See you soon.
G.