Starving our Microbial Self: The Deleterious Consequences of a Diet Deficient in Microbiota-Accessible Carbohydrates

By E. Sonnenburg, Justin L. Sonnenburg. Cell Metabolism, 2014

767 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The gut microbiota of a healthy person may not be equivalent to a healthy microbiota. It is possible that the Western microbiota is actually dysbiotic and predisposes individuals to a variety of diseases. The asymmetric plasticity between the relatively stable human genome and the more malleable gut microbiome suggests that incompatibilities between the two could rapidly arise. The Western lifestyle, which includes a diet low in microbiota-accessible carbohydrates (MACs), has selected for a microbiota with altered membership and functionality compared to those of groups living traditional lifestyles. Interactions between resident microbes and host leading to immune dysregulation may explain several diseases that share inflammation as a common basis. The low-MAC Western diet results in poor production of gut microbiota-generated short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which attenuate inflammation through a variety of mechanisms in mouse models. Studies focused on modern and traditional societies, combined with animal models, are needed to characterize the connection between diet, microbiota composition, and function. Differentiating between an optimal microbiota, one that increases disease risk, and one that is causative or potentiates disease will be required to further understand both the etiology and possible treatments for health problems related to microbiota dysbiosis.

Subfields: Gastroenterology, Molecular Biology, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3faf74203570f5b2a764b99e3ba4dc377c34184e

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1. Cody J. Beemer
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Citations in the corpus

• Ten questions concerning the built environment and mental health (2019, background): “Immunoregulation, indicated by a balanced expansion of effector T-cell populations (which induce inflammatory responses) and Treg (which induce immunoregulatory and anti-inflammatory responses), is known to be driven by microbial signals, mainly by organisms with which mammals coevolved, including: ”
• A dietary fiber-deprived gut microbiota degrades the colonic mucus barrier and enhances pathogen susceptibility (2016, unknown): “C gory that includes a broad array of polysaccharides that are not digestible by human enzymes—has also drawn it into the spotlight: it provides an important substrate to the community of microbes (microbiota) that inhabits the distal gut (Sonnenburg and Sonnenburg, 2014).”
• Gut Microbiota-Targeted Diets Modulate Human Immune Status (2020, unknown): “…fiber in supporting gut microbiota diversity and metabolism, and the positive role of short-chain fatty acids, a product of fiber fermentation by the gut microbiota, in maintaining gut barrier health and attenuating inflammation (reviewed in Makki et al., 2018; Sonnenburg and Sonnenburg, 2014).”