Dietetics: a microbiota under advanced scientific analyses…
For several decades now, it has been fashionable to follow the recommendations of this professor or the latest fashionable magazine on diet. However, people are increasingly crazy about what differentiates them from others. They buy personalized products and practice individualized classes in fitness, cooking, life organization, etc.
Thus, when a new American study comes to abound in this direction and proposes, in the not so distant future, an à la carte diet to enrich its microbiota, it cannot go unnoticed(1).
Our second brain
The microbiota is made up of thousands of bacteria that, like neurons in our brain, communicate with each other(2). This bacterial cooperation can be more or less beneficial depending on the way the person feeds. Hence the interest of this recent discovery.
In fact, scientists are opening up a new perspective, which is that of adapting one’s diet according to one’s genetics. According to the researcher in charge of the study, Professor Karine Clément, of the Institute of Cardiometabolism and Nutrition (ICAN) at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, it is “a first step towardspersonalized nutrition“. Words are out!
The journal “Cell Metabolism” therefore publishes his work. These were carried out in collaboration with the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The French team has provided, and continues to provide, the nutritional data. As for the Swedes, they take care of the calculation software and its development. In fact, Swedish mathematicians used data from a 2013 experiment at ICAN where 50 obese subjects volunteered to follow a weight loss program with dietary and blood monitoring of their bacterial flora. The collaboration is not new.
Be that as it may, the conclusions are edifying and prove the definite effectiveness of the mathematical model adopted and completely new. The latter makes it possible to anticipate the fallout of a person’s eating pattern according to the composition of his microbiota: when the latter is poor, the risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases is increased. This discovery is only anintroductionto a European-scale project called “Metacardis”.
The cornerstone: the mathematical model
The scientists assume that by combining the analysis of the intestinal flora with food inputs, it will then be possible to envisage a nutrition adapted to each microbiota and therefore to each. The mathematical model analyzes gut bacterial relationships that are akin to factories that turn food into metabolites. This hypothesis could be confirmed by a battery of tests.
However, this does not happen identically depending on the composition of the intestinal flora. Karine Clément says that it will soon be possible to predict the production failures of certain patients in order to make changes tomake the microbiota richer. This will be done by altering the intake of specific typical foods and probiotic supplementation.
However, these projections are still under study and it will take about five years to establish a map of the thousands of targeted intestinal bacteria. And even if the calculation method has been simplified, many bacterial interactions remain unknown, as well as the different exchanges between them and food categories such as white meats, legumes or dairy products.
One day, not so far away, everyone will be able to pay daily attention to their intestinal flora and thus restore the right balance between what they need to bring to their body at such a time of day or in such life circumstances.
Stephen Paul is the lead author and founder of My Health Sponsor. Holder of a diploma in health and well-being coaching with more than 200 articles in the field of health, he makes it a point of honor to offer advice based on reliable information, based on scientific research, and verified by health professionals.