Insight into the prebiotic concept: lessons from an exploratory, double blind intervention study with inulin-type fructans in obese women

By E. Dewulf, Patrice D Cani, Sandrine P. Claus, S. Fuentes, P. Puylaert, A. Neyrinck, L. Bindels, W. M. D. De Vos, G. Gibson, J. Thissen and 1 more. Gut, 2012

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Objective To highlight the contribution of the gut microbiota to the modulation of host metabolism by dietary inulin-type fructans (ITF prebiotics) in obese women. Methods A double blind, placebo controlled, intervention study was performed with 30 obese women treated with ITF prebiotics (inulin/oligofructose 50/50 mix; n=15) or placebo (maltodextrin; n=15) for 3 months (16 g/day). Blood, faeces and urine sampling, oral glucose tolerance test, homeostasis model assessment and impedancemetry were performed before and after treatment. The gut microbial composition in faeces was analysed by phylogenetic microarray and qPCR analysis of 16S rDNA. Plasma and urine metabolic profiles were analysed by 1H-NMR spectroscopy. Results Treatment with ITF prebiotics, but not the placebo, led to an increase in Bifidobacterium and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii; both bacteria negatively correlated with serum lipopolysaccharide levels. ITF prebiotics also decreased Bacteroides intestinalis, Bacteroides vulgatus and Propionibacterium, an effect associated with a slight decrease in fat mass and with plasma lactate and phosphatidylcholine levels. No clear treatment clustering could be detected for gut microbial analysis or plasma and urine metabolomic profile analyses. However, ITF prebiotics led to subtle changes in the gut microbiota that may importantly impact on several key metabolites implicated in obesity and/or diabetes. Conclusions ITF prebiotics selectively changed the gut microbiota composition in obese women, leading to modest changes in host metabolism, as suggested by the correlation between some bacterial species and metabolic endotoxaemia or metabolomic signatures.

Subfields: Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Molecular Biology, Nutrition and Dietetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/807a46e7b338ab39539cdc3b9a4c460bf8307199

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Citations in the corpus

Intestinal permeability – a new target for disease prevention and therapy (2014, background): “In addition, administration of selected prebiotics or probiotics can improve metabolic alterations in animal models of metabolic liver disease [103,127] and in obese human individuals [234,235].”
Modulation of gut microbiota during probiotic-mediated attenuation of metabolic syndrome in high fat diet-fed mice (2014, background): “was significantly and negatively correlated with plasma endotoxin level in Pearson’s correlation analysis and thus was considered as a main gut bacterial group mediating the beneficial effects of the prebiotic treatment; in another study on obese women ingesting inulin-type fructans (Dewulf et al., ”
Dietary Fiber-Induced Improvement in Glucose Metabolism Is Associated with Increased Abundance of Prevotella. (2015, background): “Dietary interventions are thus a potential tool to modulate gut microbiota and further impact host health (Dewulf et al., 2013; KovatchevaDatchary and Arora, 2013).”
From Dietary Fiber to Host Physiology: Short-Chain Fatty Acids as Key Bacterial Metabolites. (2016, neutral): “Improved postprandial glucose response and enrichment of butyrate-producing bacteria were found after 3 months intake of a mixture of inulin and oligofructose in obese women (Dewulf et al., 2013), and in mice that are obese due to either genetic manipulation or diet, supplementation with inulin-type”
Gut Microbiota in Cardiovascular Health and Disease (2017, result): “However, in a subsequent follow-up clinical study, the prebiotic treatment in women with obesity did not show similar strong effects, raising questions as to the translatability of studies performed in mice compared with humans.(176) It has also been found that not all humans respond to dietary chan”
Expert consensus document: The International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP) consensus statement on the definition and scope of prebiotics (2017, neutral): “In 2015, Bindels et al. 21 proposed that specificity requirements should be removed on the basis of reports showing that multiple taxa, rather than particular species, were enriched by prebiotics 22 .”
Short chain fatty acids in human gut and metabolic health. (2020, positive): “Such in vitro mechanistic studies investigating inulin-type-fructans are supported by human studies following dietary consumption and subsequent analyses of the faecal microbiota by molecular technologies such as 16S rRNA sequencing or real-time PCR (Dewulf et al., 2013; Healey et al., 2018; Ramirez”