Western, industrialized diets are seriously lacking in fiber, and it may be fundamentally changing the way our guts digest tough plant matter.
The team pooled data from 766,345 people that had been involved in genome-wide association studies and found correlation between factors like education and higher intelligence and lower risk of certain gut disorders.
The idea that food delivers important messages to our genome is the focus of a field known as nutrigenomics.
The evolution of dietary and hygienic habits in Western countries is associated with a decrease in the bacteria that help in digestion. These very bacteria were also found in the Iceman, who lived 5300 years ago, and are still present in non-Westernized populations in various parts of the world.
There's a lot of evidence to suggest that the gut microbiota play a role. Over the next year, US researchers will try to suss out how millions of tiny microbes living inside us might make the difference between a cancer treatment's success and its failure.
Australian study has created the most comprehensive collection of human intestinal bacteria to date. This will help researchers worldwide to investigate how our microbiome keeps us healthy, and its role in disease.
Changing the gut microbiome to beat illness really does hold great potential, but first scientists must answer what constitutes a healthy gut microbiome and in whom.
Such a Noah's Ark of beneficial germs would be gathered from human populations whose microbiomes are uncompromised by antibiotics, processed diets and other ill effects of modern society.
Scientists fed fruit flies with a combination of probiotics and an herbal supplement called Triphala that was able to prolong the flies' longevity by 60 % and protect them against chronic diseases associated with aging.
University of Louisville neurology professor Robert P. Friedland have proposed a new term "mapranosis" to describe an interaction between gut microbiota and the brain.
The bacteria in our gut, researchers found, produce one of the same signaling molecules that humans do, which can then interact with receptors in the body to mediate health.
A great deal of mystery DNA has been found in the human gut.
According to team of neuroscientists in Portugal and Australia, bacteria in the guts may be chemically communicating with the brain in such a way as to impact dietary choices.
A primer on Epigenetics
Unhealthy microbiota has been linked to depression, anxiety, stress, and may even affect how well you sleep.
