The Gut’s Microbiome Changes Rapidly with Diet

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By Rachel Feltman  
A new study finds that populations of bacteria in the gut are highly sensitive to the food we digest

You are what you eat, and so are the bacteria that live in your gut.

Microbiologists have known for some time that different diets create different gut flora, but previous research has focused on mice instead of humans, leaving the actual relationship between our food and our stomach bacteria unclear. A new study, published Wednesday in Nature, indicates that these changes can happen incredibly fast in the human gut—within three or four days of a big shift in what you eat. “We found that the bacteria that lives in peoples’ guts is surprisingly responsive to change in diet,” Lawrence David, assistant professor at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and one of the study’s authors, says. “Within days we saw not just a variation in the abundance of different kinds of bacteria, but in the kinds of genes they were expressing.” (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)