What Food Label Nutrition Facts Don't Tell You About Your Gut Microbes

What Food Label Nutrition Facts Don't Tell You About Your Gut Microbes What nutrients will help the microbes in your gut thrive? Rocketclips, Inc./Shutterstock.com

It seems like every day a new study is published that links the bacteria in the gut to a specific disease or health condition. The allure of research like ours and that of other groups is that it might eventually be possible to give personalized recommendations for what specific foods to eat to shift your bacteria in a direction that improves your health.

To understand how individual foods change the bacteria that live inside the human gut, collectively known as the microbiome, we need to know the microscopic makeup of each food we eat. But that data isn’t available on food labels or in any current nutritional databases.

This lack of detail has been a limitation in understanding specific food-microbe relationships in humans to date. As a registered dietitian and nutrition scientist, I’ve had a longstanding interest in foods and human health. When I joined a computational research lab studying the microbiome, I was interested to learn if it would be possible to predict how foods changed the microbiome if we simply gathered a enough daily data from a group of people eating their normal diets.

Learning from 500 stool samples

In our recent study, published in “Cell Host & Microbe,” our research group studied the effect of foods on the microbiome. We recruited 34 volunteers and asked them to record everything they ate during a 17-day period and to also provide daily stool samples. By analyzing the microbial DNA in the stool samples, we were able to see what species made up their microbiome.


 Get The Latest By Email

Weekly Magazine Daily Inspiration

We found that the nutritional content of our subjects’ diets – the macro- and micronutrients like what is usually shown on a food label, such as fats, carbohydrates and sodium – didn’t help us to understand the microbial communities or how they changed from day to day.

But, when we considered the specific foods they ate, we could connect our subjects’ dietary intake to their microbiome composition. We think that this worked because our method let us use the concept of a food to capture some of the complexity of the compounds inside that food that are not usually listed on a food label.

We believe it is noteworthy that the the effects of foods were very personalized – meaning that we saw the same species of microbes respond differently to similar foods in different people.

I am hopeful that in the near future we will be able to confidently tell you what foods will change your microbiome. As a whole, microbiome science is not able to confidently do that just yet, but our recent study contributes towards that long-term goal.

About The Author

Abigail Johnson, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Minnesota

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

books_food

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES

English Afrikaans Arabic Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Malay Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

follow InnerSelf on

facebook icontwitter iconyoutube iconinstagram iconpintrest iconrss icon

 Get The Latest By Email

Weekly Magazine Daily Inspiration

Thursday, 27 July 2023 22:59

Loneliness can profoundly impact our physical and emotional health, and a new study from Tulane University has shed light on its significant role in the development of cardiovascular disease among...

Monday, 24 July 2023 19:42

Today, mountains of calorie-rich (and often nutritionally poor) food and lakes of sugary beverages are readily available in much of the world. It’s no longer necessary to leave home — or even stand...

Wednesday, 05 May 2021 08:15

While our immune system and antibiotics both do a great job of helping us fight life-threatening infections, the emergence of antibiotic resistance is quickly making it more difficult to cure...

Friday, 14 May 2021 16:24

The chakras set the frequencies that give rise to every aspect of the human experience. The foods we eat have consciousness and provide an energetic blueprint that stabilizes and entrains...

Wednesday, 19 May 2021 09:40

To “cry poor mouth” is an expression used to habitually complain about a lack of money. A literal poor mouth, however, represents one of the most widespread global diseases: tooth decay.

Wednesday, 26 May 2021 08:54

The term “exercise is medicine” is rightfully well publicised. It’s one of the best ways to stay healthy, yet medicine doesn’t work if you aren’t prepared to take it.

New Attitudes - New Possibilities

InnerSelf.comClimateImpactNews.com | InnerPower.net
MightyNatural.com | WholisticPolitics.com | InnerSelf Market
Copyright ©1985 - 2021 InnerSelf Publications. All Rights Reserved.