The gut bacteria of meat eaters are similar to those of vegans and vegetarians, provided they also eat a wide range of plant-based foods.
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Our guts are home to billions of microbes that have a profound influence on our overall health. Now a new study reveals that whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore, the key to a healthy gut microbiome is the same: eat lots of different plant-based foods.
Gut microbes break down foods your body can’t digest and, in turn, produce chemical messengers that influence everything from your blood sugar levels to your immune system. Some of these messengers can improve health, others can harm it. It all depends on what you feed your microbes.
“The microbiome modulates the effect of diet on our health. It essentially decides our state of health”, says Nicola Segata, professor at the University of Trento in Italy which studies the microbiome using advanced genome sequencing.
He and an international team of colleagues wanted to know how different diets shape the types of microbes that dominate our guts. So they analyzed stool samples from more than 21,000 people in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. Not only did the researchers know whether the participants were vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore, but they also had detailed information on what these people ate for a few weeks at a time.
What they found was that the more plant-based foods people ate, the more gut bacteria they had linked to better health, like less inflammation and a stronger immune system. Perhaps not surprisingly, these good bacteria are a hallmark of vegans’ microbiome.
As for omnivores, their gut microbiome tend to have more bacteria associated with meat digestion, which makes sense. But they also had more bacteria linked to inflammatory bowel disease and a higher risk of colon cancer. That’s the bad news.
But the good news for meat eaters is that when it comes to having a healthy composition of good bacteria, their gut microbiome looks a lot like that of vegans and vegetarians – provided they eat a range of foods. plant-based foods in large quantities. .
“Omnivores who ate a wide diversity of vegetables were actually quite similar in good microbes to vegans,” says Segata.
This finding is important because it shows that “eating a range of plant-based foods is more important than strictly adhering to a vegan or vegetarian diet,” says Hannah Holscher, an associate professor of nutrition and microbiome researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the study.
In other words, it’s the overall quality of the diet that matters, she says.
The study is one of the largest of its kind. Holscher, who is also a registered dietitian, says this adds to existing evidence that supports the advice nutritionists like to give: For best health, eat the rainbow, meaning many kinds different colorful plant foods.
“Think tomatoes, butternut squash, pineapple, avocado, broccoli and kale, blueberries and eggplant. And don’t really forget whole grains, nuts, seeds and legumes,” says Holscher.
Holscher emphasizes a 2018 study which found that people who ate more than 30 different types of plant foods each week also had more gut microbes that produce chemical messengers known to improve health. But she says you don’t have to aim for 30 to improve your health.
She says a simple goal is to eat five different plant-based foods every day. For example, consider making bean or lentil soups with lots of vegetables, or tossing pears or berries into your salad.
“Make some overnight oats before you go to bed,” suggests Holscher. “When you go to work in the morning, you look around. What can you put in your bag? An apple, an orange, a banana?”
And when trying to diversify the plants in your diet, look for high-fiber options, advises Shana Spencedietitian in Brooklyn, New York, because most Americans don’t get enough of it. dietary hero nutrient. A simple idea: Try adding seeds like chia seeds, pumpkin seeds or flax seeds, as an easy way to diversify your plant intake and increase the fiber content of any meal.
“They’re so good to add to yogurt, oatmeal and cereal in the morning,” Spence says. “And they are shelf-stable, which is great because we don’t want to waste money, especially not in this economy.”
Frozen foods, whether berries or mixed vegetables, are also a great option. “It’s usually cheaper than buying fresh, and it’s still just as healthy because you still get vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. The vegetables are picked at their peak, so they still provide tons of nutrients” , explains Spence.
Give yourself as many opportunities as possible to snack on more plants each day, advises Spence. Instead of setting a goal to restrict certain foods, think of healthy eating as a matter of adding, she says. And try to add more nutrients to your diet every day.
Edited by Jane Greenhalgh