Working to get your gut healthy will require you to understand nutrition labels. Unfortunately, even foods with similar nutrition labels can affect the microbiomes in your gut differently. For example, two yogurts may be similar in calcium and protein content but could affect your gut differently due to things like sugar, fiber and beneficial probiotics.
New research looked at how different foods influenced changes in the gut microbiome, even when the items that were consumed had very similar nutrition labels.
Similar nutrition and microbiome changes
A team of scientists recruited 34 volunteers to record everything they ate for 17 days and supply daily stool samples. The researchers were hoping that they’d be able to identify correlations between some nutrients and specific strains of microbes.
After completing shotgun metagenomic sequencing on the stool samples, the team was surprised to find that even foods with similar nutritional labels had different effects on the microbiome.
“We had to scratch our heads and come up with a new approach for measuring and comparing the different foods,” explains Dan Knights, the senior author of the study, which was completed by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the BioTechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota.
A new approach
The scientists were determined to create a new plan. They opted to develop a structured hierarchy that would help them identify the difference between foods with similar nutritional profiles.
“The microbiome has been linked to a broad range of human conditions, including metabolic disorders, autoimmune diseases, and infections,” explains Knights, “so there is strong motivation to manipulate the microbiome with diet as a way to influence health. This study suggests that it’s more complicated than just looking at dietary components like fiber and sugar. Much more research is needed before we can understand how the full range of nutrients in food affects how the microbiome responds to what we eat.”
