When Your Gut Bacteria Run Out of Fibre, They Start Eating Your Gut Lining!
Plant-based diets have many health benefits, including being a great source of fibre. Most people don’t eat enough fibre and that has impact on our overall health and longevity.
While we know that plant-based diets improve our overall health, new research finds that fibre is only one of the health benefits. Recently scientists have found that certain digestion-resistant plant proteins are equally important. They are shaping our gut microbiome, changing intestinal bacteria, making them produce health-promoting compounds rather than harmful ones.
Plant foods promote a diverse and thriving gut ecosystem, and support everything from your metabolism and immune system to cardiovascular and digestive health. New research shows how many of these beneficial microbes act as crucial partners, breaking down nutrients that our own digestive system cannot process independently.
New studies led by researchers at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Princeton University highlights new benefits from eating more fibre and how what we eat changes our gut microbiome.
Plant Food Benefits Include Fibre and Prifs
While dietary fibre is well-known for fuelling beneficial gut microbes, researchers have not studied the plant proteins that aren’t fully broken down as they pass through our digestive system. Researchers call these indigestible plant proteins, Prifs, and they play an important role in our gut health.
Prifs work in cooperation with plant fibre to change how gut bacteria process nutrients. This helps shift their activity toward the production of beneficial phenol metabolites.
A low fibre diet does what?
When our gut bacteria lack fibre, when we aren’t eating enough fibre and plant-based proteins, they begin to eat the gut’s lining and this promotes the production of harmful metabolites. The harmful phenols come from gut bacteria breaking down proteins that are found in the mucus layer that coats the intestines. This protective mucus helps separate intestinal microbes from the cells lining the gut and forms part of the body’s natural defence system.
The fibre shield
Eating enough dietary fibre provides a buffer for the gut’s lining. This preserves our body’s natural defenses because Prifs are providing healthy alternative nutrients for bacterial metabolism.
What this could mean.
Not only does this suggest that our diet changes our bodies internal metabolism, but that whole food, plant-based diets provide fibre and Prifs that can maintain digestive health and prevent gastrointestinal disorders.
While this research comes from animals and laboratory experiments, it provides clues to metabolic diseases, cancer and digestive health. It also highlights that attempts to manipulate the gut microbiome with probiotics and diet needs to consider more than the food, but our bodies metabolic abilities.
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Shayla
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