Your gut bugs and diet

How does diet affect your microbiota?

There’s a lot of things in life that can make changes in your gut microbiota community. Let’s have a look at diet. Changes in macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) can lead to significant changes to your gut microbiota community.

By changes I mean short-term extreme changes. For example, if you eat just plant-based foods for 4 days or if you eat only an animal-based diet for 4 days that can shift the dominant bacteria in your gut microbiota community.

Your gut microbiota community can also have major changes if you alter the fat or fibre (higher or lower) content of your diet.

Diets high in fat and low in fibre have a higher abundance of Firmicutes bacteria in them and a decreased amount of Bacteroides which also affects your metabolism for the worse.

Generally, people who have a diet high in fat and low in fibre can be heading towards chronic disease such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity just to name a few.

The research is very clear in this area, overweight people generally have a high abundance of Firmicutes and a lower abundance of Bacteroides. Their slimmer counterparts usually have a higher abundance of Bacteroides and a lower abundance of Firmicutes.

Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what to eat to be your healthiest but as long as you get enough plant food and fibre into your world your gut bugs will be very happy.