In a recently published magazine Cell Researchers at the Journal of the University of Alberta in Canada and University College Kirk, Ireland, analyzed recent nutritional guidelines for stomach microbiota.
Review: Considering healthy food in the light of stomach microbiome. Image credit: Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock
Background
Diet is important for human health and the pathogenesis of epidemic-level non-communicable chronic diseases. The steady increase in chronic diseases in the non-industrial population, which is turning into a Western-style diet, is a remarkable witness to the substantial impact of diet on human health.
Given the global epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases, evidence-based dietary advice is important for health promotion. Although the human stomach microbiota port is an important relevance to the physiological consequences of diet and the origin of chronic disease, national dietary recommendations worldwide are beginning to take advantage of scientific advances in the microbiome field.
Studies in the field of microbiome and nutrition have recently expanded. However, diet-microbiome-host connections have received little attention in recent dietary guidelines.
About the study
In a recent review, researchers addressed current nutrition guidelines from a microbiology perspective, focusing on the mechanical findings that revealed host-microbial interactions as drivers of dietary physiological effects. Scientists have limited their discussion to food-based dietary guidelines for health promotion and disease prevention in the general public, which is the goal of these guidelines.
The team focused on studies that show how intestinal microbiota regulates and facilitates the physiological effects of dietary compounds, dietary habits, and specific foods. They used their findings to clarify the debate on nutrition, to create innovative nutrition advice, and to provide experimental paradigms to include microbiome within nutrition research.
Interaction between stomach microbiota and recommended foods
The authors found that many countries with different dietary traditions have a high level of consistency in their national food-based dietary guidelines. These guidelines were in line with other major nutrition platforms such as the EAT-Lancet Commission and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health on healthy eating and sustainable food systems.
All dietary guidelines recommend whole foods, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and nuts, as well as processed foods instead of added salt, saturated fat, or sugar. Dietary fiber and phytochemicals make up two important parts of the whole plant diet.
Rapidly fermentable ingredients in processed foods can induce excessive growth of bacteria in the small intestine and an undesirable microbial metabolic and structural profile. In addition, it affects the immune and endocrine systems. However, colonic microbiota does not have access to them.
Evidence of the ability of whole grains to reduce the risk of chronic diseases was strong, and the effect of intestinal bacteria on these effects was being studied more and more. According to a study combining human research and mechanical evaluations in mice, microbiota may play a role in affecting the health of whole grains.
Many dietary criteria suggest that plant-related protein foods should be consumed frequently because of the benefits to human and planetary health. Mounting studies indicate that the microbiome of the stomach plays a role in the health benefits of the fruit. In addition, there is strong evidence from observational and intervention studies that high fatty fish consumption has a cardioprotective effect, and that stomach health may be mediating these health benefits.
Mediterranean diet
The Mediterranean diet integrates many food types that have a favorable effect on host interactions. It recommends moderate consumption of fruits, vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, and olive oil in the diet, eggs, poultry, fish, and dairy products, and limited consumption of processed and red meats and processed foods.
Many recent microbiome studies reinforce the dominance of the Mediterranean diet in dietary guidelines. In fact, the recently updated Dietary Guidelines advocate eating habits that reflect the Mediterranean diet, such as dietary approaches to prevent high blood pressure (DASH).
Diet-microbial-host connections in healthy eating controversy
An expert panel from the World Health Organization (WHO) or the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) explains the toxicity considerations of existing dietary guidelines based on the risk classification of red and processed meats as well as possible dose-response correlations. In addition, many mechanistic animal models emphasize the potentially harmful effects of milk-based saturated fats on microbiota homeostasis, strengthening dietary recommendations to limit high-fat dairy consumption.
It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. Using microbiome-targeted techniques to increase a low carbohydrate diet would be beneficial, the authors noted.
Effect of stomach microbiome on advancing nutritional guidelines
The team said that dietary recommendations, focused nutrition approaches, and the development of food products to combat long-term disease risk could benefit from an account of how diet-microbiome interactions affect human physiology. It also lays the groundwork for initiatives to restore the microbiome. Microbiome restoration techniques can theoretically be achieved with dietary sybiotics and probiotics.
Improved, rather than eliminated, processed foods are envisaged to increase the quality of population-wide diet. Such efforts will require food engineering success in addressing diet-microbial-host interconnections.
The researchers noted that nutrition strategies can be used to target microbiome and health-promoting taxa once their characteristics have been identified. Microbiome assessments were an important element of precision-nutrition methods focused on long-term disease prevention and therapy, among other individual-specific aspects, due to the highly adapted response of stomach microbiota to the diet.
An experimental framework for integrating stomach microbiome into nutrition research
Data on diet-microbiome-host relationships can improve, modify, and innovate dietary guidelines. The integration of the intestinal microbiome into dietary recommendations should be supported by evidence of the cause and mechanistic contribution of the microbiome to the physiological effects of the diet.
The team noted excellent reviews that set the best-practice criteria for diet-microbiome studies and supplemented them with a three-column experimental design involving stomach microbiome at all stages of nutrition research. Among these columns were microbiome inventions to develop healthy eating hypotheses, microbiome integration into human intervention studies, and mechanical understanding and causal conclusions regarding the function of microbiome in dietary effects.
Conclusion
According to the authors, the convergence of basic concepts in the areas of nutrition and microbiome confirms the current dietary recommendations. They found that systematically incorporating microbiome knowledge into nutrition studies could further promote and revolutionize healthy eating.
Overall, the study findings indicated that diet was significantly associated with the absence or presence of disease, which was later linked to microbiome. Dietary-microbiome connections were expected to contribute to the molecular basis of dietary physiological effects, making the stomach microbiome a “black box” of nutrition studies. There is a compelling evolutionary and biological argument for two topics to expand their already extensive and ongoing collaboration to learn more about how to improve health through diet.
The researchers said that microbiome-focused endpoints should be included in all aspects of nutrition science to enhance the scientific basis for dietary recommendations. In addition, nutritional microbiology research can provide detailed information on all the elements of a healthy diet. Thus, diet-related diseases contribute to solving the problem of prevention and control.