Fat, Fiber and Cancer Risk in African Americans and Rural Africans

By Stephen J.D. O'Keefe, Jia V. Li, L. Lahti, J. Ou, Franck Carbonero, K. Mohammed, J. Posma, James Kinross, Elaine Wahl, E. Ruder and 14 more. Nature Communications, 2015

889 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rates of colon cancer are much higher in African Americans (65:100,000) than in rural South Africans (<5:100,000). The higher rates are associated with higher animal protein and fat, and lower fibre consumption, higher colonic secondary bile acids, lower colonic short-chain fatty acid quantities and higher mucosal proliferative biomarkers of cancer risk in otherwise healthy middle-aged volunteers. Here we investigate further the role of fat and fibre in this association. We performed 2-week food exchanges in subjects from the same populations, where African Americans were fed a high-fibre, low-fat African-style diet and rural Africans a high-fat, low-fibre western-style diet, under close supervision. In comparison with their usual diets, the food changes resulted in remarkable reciprocal changes in mucosal biomarkers of cancer risk and in aspects of the microbiota and metabolome known to affect cancer risk, best illustrated by increased saccharolytic fermentation and butyrogenesis, and suppressed secondary bile acid synthesis in the African Americans. African Americans have much higher colon cancer rates than rural South Africans, which is associated with dietary and metabolic differences. Here, O’Keefe et al.show that switching quantities of fat and fibre leads to reciprocal changes in gut microbiota, metabolites and cancer biomarkers.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d188c1fa777487fb88a9fd5dcc4c57ef216b14a

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Citations in the corpus

Gut Microbiota-Targeted Diets Modulate Human Immune Status (2020, positive): “A 2-week food exchange study in which African Americans consumed a rural African diet and rural Africans ate a typical African American diet revealed measurable changes to the microbiota and markers of cancer risk despite the brevity of the dietary intervention (O’Keefe et al., 2015).”
Geography, Ethnicity or Subsistence-Specific Variations in Human Microbiome Composition and Diversity (2017, background): “…Blaser, 2002; Ley et al., 2005; Turnbaugh et al., 2006; Blaser et al., 2008; Gao et al., 2008; Islami and Kamangar, 2008; Garrett et al., 2010; Tana et al., 2010; Castellarin et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2011; Kostic et al., 2012; Blekhman et al., 2015; O’Keefe et al., 2015; Goodrich et al., 2016).”
Improvement of Insulin Sensitivity after Lean Donor Feces in Metabolic Syndrome Is Driven by Baseline Intestinal Microbiota Composition. (2017, background): “These include the lactate-producing Lactobacillus salivarius (Messaoudi et al., 2013) and butyrate-producing Butyrivibrio (de la Cuesta-Zuluaga et al., 2017), Clostridium symbiosum (O’Keefe et al., 2015), and Eubacterium species (Vrieze et al., 2012; Udayappan et al., 2016).”
Colorectal Cancer Incidence Patterns in the United States, 1974–2013 (2017, background): “A recent study found that de novo introduction of a Western-style high-fat, low-fiber diet initiates inflammation and proliferation in the colonic mucosa within two weeks (31).”