New research: influence of diet on gut microbiome.

If you have SIBO, you already know that the type of food you eat influences the type of microbes in your GI tract. That's why you're here in the first place—following a SIBO-safe diet, avoiding fibrous high FODMAP-containing foods, etc, etc.

An abundance of fresh plant foods, nuts, beans, whole grains and other staples of traditional diets are lacking in the Standard American Diet. For most people, that's a problem. Current (and very sound) wisdom encourages the public to eat more plant-based and low fat foods to encourage the growth of healthy flora in our guts.

In the case of SIBO, that all goes on its ear. It's confusing and frustrating for those of us with a fondness for animals, a penchant for vegetarianism and a love of eating unprocessed whole foods. I'm on a mission to figure out how to fuse these two divergent nutritional angles. After I finish killing off the minions, that is.

Anyway, I was excited to see this brand new study— just out last month, in the Swedish journal Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease (Microb Ecol Health Dis. 2015 Feb 4;26:26164)—which highlights recent findings in the field of diet and microbiota.

Here's the abstract from "Contribution of diet to the composition of the human gut microbiota," by D. Graf, et al. (Underlines are mine.)

"In the human gut, millions of bacteria contribute to the microbiota, whose composition is specific for every individual. Although we are just at the very beginning of understanding the microbiota concept, we already know that the composition of the microbiota has a profound impact on human health. A key factor in determining gut microbiota composition is diet. Preliminary evidence suggests that dietary patterns are associated with distinct combinations of bacteria in the intestine, also called enterotypes. Western diets result in significantly different microbiota compositions than traditional diets. It is currently unknown which food constituents specifically promote growth and functionality of beneficial bacteria in the intestine. The aim of this review is to summarize the recently published evidence from human in vivo studies on the gut microbiota-modulating effects of diet. It includes sections on dietary patterns (e.g. Western diet), whole foods, food constituents, as wells as food-associated microbes and their influence on the composition of human gut microbiota. The conclusions highlight the problems faced by scientists in this fast-developing field of research, and the need for high-quality, large-scale human dietary intervention studies."

By the way, Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease is an open access journal meaning you don't need to pay big bucks to subscribe in order to read their material. If you are a science geek like me, you might want to click here to access the journal's website. There you can read the full text of the article cited above and hundreds of other fascinating papers on this topic.