“If you’re making resolutions for a healthier new year, consider a gut makeover.”This is the startin

“If you’re making resolutions for a healthier new year, consider a gut makeover.”This is the starting sentence of a recent article in the New York Times, “A Gut Makeover for the New Year.” Given the recent uptick in research on the many effects the intestinal microbiota may have on human health–– our nutritional intake, our immune systems, and even diseases ranging from allergies to diabetes to depression–– a ‘makeover’ of these microbes could have a huge effect. Much of the composition of the microbiome is established early in life, shaped by forces like your genetics and whether you were breast-fed or bottle-fed. Microbial diversity may be further undermined by the typical high-calorie American diet, rich in sugar, meats and processed foods. But a new study in mice and people adds to evidence that suggests you can take steps to enrich your gut microbiota. Changing your diet to one containing a variety of plant-based foods, the new research suggests, may be crucial to achieving a healthier microbiome.Achieving this healthier microbiome, the article admits, will probably not be an easy feat, and will take an as-yet unspecified amount of time.“The nutritional value of food is influenced in part by the microbial community that encounters that food,” said Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, the senior author of the new paper and director of the Center for Genome Science and Systems Biology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Nutritional components of a healthy diet have to be viewed from “the inside out,” he said, “not just the outside in.”Dr. Gordon’s study, published in Cell Host & Microbe recently, looked into how diet affects this microbial community. Human gut bacteria was placed into sterile mice, who were fed various diets and analyzed. Among the most interesting findings were that a ‘calorie restricted’ group of mice (eating less than 1,800 calories a day of plant-based foods for two years) had a richer microbial community and more strains of “good” bacteria. Mice fed a ‘typical American diet” (3,000 calories a day featuring processed cheese, lunch meats, and few fruits and vegetables) did not fare quite as well.For more information on how to reboot your gut for 2017 read the rest of the article in The New York Times here. -- source link

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