Low-Fiber Diets Kill Off Some Species of Gut Bacteria - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Lottie Peppers on 25 Jan 16Sonnenburg, his wife Erica, and the graduate student Samuel Smits confirmed this idea in a recent experiment. The researchers started with mice that had been raised in sterile bubbles and then loaded with identical collections of gut microbes. They then fed these mice a high-fiber diet, before randomly switching half of them to low-fiber chow for seven weeks. Predictably, the fall in fiber caused upheavals in the rodents' guts. In the low-fiber group, the numbers of 60 percent of the local microbe species fell dramatically, and some remained low even after the mice returned to high-fiber meals. Those seven low-fiber weeks left lingering scars on the animals' microbiomes.