THURSDAY, Sept. 1 (HealthDay News) -- You are what you eat -- especially when it comes to the microbes that live in your gut.
New research shows that people who eat a diet that's high in fats and animal proteins have a certain group of bacteria that flourish in their digestive tract, while the guts of people who eat a more plant-based, higher carbohydrate fare favor other microbes.
What that means for human health is still unknown. But there's increasing evidence that the "microbiota" that live in the human gut may play an important role in health, including possibly contributing to obesity and other ailments, researchers said.
The findings are published in the Sept. 1 issue of Science.
In the study, researchers asked 98 healthy, non-obese America adults to report on their usual diet and the diet they ate in the week prior to giving a stool sample. From each sample, researchers then isolated the DNA of the bacteria present.
The analysis showed that participants could be generally grouped into one of two categories, or "enterotypes", based on the prevalence of certain species of bacteria in the gut. People in the first group had high levels of the bacteria Bacteroides. In type 2, Prevotella was more prevalent.
"You could see the people who consumed more animal protein and fat tended to fall into an enterotype characters by Bacteroides, whereas those who tended to have a diet high in carbohydrates [more plant-based] fell into an enterotype characterized by Prevotella," said study co-senior author Dr. James Lewis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
In a second experiment, researchers had 10 participants, all of whom fell into the Bacteroides group, stay in a research lab for 10 days. Both groups were fed an identical diet and an identical amount of
'/>"/>
| Copyright©2010 ScoutNews,LLC. All rights reserved |