Turns out that fecal transplants are No. 2.
It’s hard to imagine, but these transplants are really hot right now. Clinical trials have shown promising results for treating cancer, reversing the effects of aging and healing the gut.
Luckily, a new study suggests there’s a much simpler and more appetizing way to optimize gut health.
The research — recently published in the journal Nature — found that a healthy diet does a better job of restoring gut health than transferring someone else’s poop into your body.
“There’s a big emphasis on treating a depleted microbiome with things like fecal transplants right now, but our study shows that this will not be successful without a healthy diet, and in fact, a healthy diet alone still outperforms it,” Joy Bergelson, executive vice president of the Simons Foundation’s Life Sciences division, said in a statement.
An international team of researchers set out to investigate how diet influences gut recovery after a round of antibiotics, which often nuke the good bacteria along with the bad.
They hopped up some mice on a model of the Western diet — which tends to be high in fat and low in fiber — while the rest of the mice were bequeathed the joys of clean eating.
The results were stark.
“In the mice that were on the healthy diet, within a week after antibiotic treatment, they recovered to almost their normal state,” said study co-author Megan Kennedy of the University of Chicago.
“By comparison, the microbiomes of the mice on the Western diet remained completely obliterated. They only had one type of bacteria left, and it dominated for weeks. They never really got back to the place they began.”
Attempts to fix things with fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) didn’t help much unless the recipient mice were already eating well.
“The idea of an FMT is that you can take the good microbes from somebody who is healthy, plop them in, and that will fix them,” said Kennedy.
“It has gotten a lot of enthusiasm, but we weren’t sure how it would interact with a Western-style diet.”
Turns out — not great.
Without the right fuel — like dietary fiber — good bacteria simply couldn’t flourish.
“It totally doesn’t stick,” Kennedy said. “On a healthy diet, the transplant works, but on the unhealthy one, the mice show basically no signs of recovery.”
The researchers believe their discovery could shed some light on why some fecal transplants work better than others.
And, for the rest of us, it’s a good reminder that eating foods rich in fiber — such as berries, beans, nuts, seeds, oatmeal, lentils and avocado — will keep your gut happy.
Read the full article here
