The Mediterranean diet could be good for your gut bacteria (at least if you're a monkey)
By Sam Downing|
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The Mediterranean diet has many ticks — it's linked to lowered risk of many diseases, it'll likely help you live longer, and it's sustainable and delicious. It could also be good for your gut bacteria.
A study published in Frontiers in Nutrition links following the Mediterranean diet to higher numbers of beneficial bacteria in the gut, and lower numbers of malicious bacteria.
That's what happened when scientists from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina put "non-human primates" — crab-eating macaques — on a Mediterranean-inspired diet, and compared changes in their gut microbiome to macaques who ate a Western-style diet.
For humans, the Mediterranean diet is characterised by high amounts of olive oil, seafood, fruit, vegetables, legumes and grains.
The monkeys' Mediterranean-style diet consisted of fish oil, olive oil, fish meal, butter, eggs, black and garbanzo bean flour, wheat flour, vegetable juice, fruit puree and sucrose (aka sugar).
The other half of the monkeys ate a lot of lard, beef tallow, butter, eggs, cholesterol, high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose, to mimic the excesses of Western eating habits.
All the monkeys followed their respective diets — which included the same number of total calories — for 30 months.
At the end of the study, the researchers inspected the monkeys' poo (lucky them) to analyse the composition of their gut microbiomes, which are generally more similar to humans' than other animals.
The Mediterranean monkeys proved to have significantly more diverse range of gut bacteria than the Western monkeys. (Past research has linked a diverse gut microbiome to better gut health.)
“Our study showed that the good bacteria, primarily Lactobacillus, most of which are probiotic, were significantly increased in the Mediterranean diet group," said the study’s lead author Dr Hariom Yadav, an assistant professor of molecular medicine and microbiology and immunology, in a statement.
Though conducted on monkeys, the study will inform future research into how diet influences the human gut microbiome, thereby influencing our health.
“We have about 2kg of good and bad bacteria living in our gut,” said Yadav. “If the bacteria are of a certain type and not properly balanced, our health can suffer."
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