That’s not to say you should start stocking up on exotic roots, berries, and wild game hoping to create the perfect balance of beneficial bacteria for your belly. Crittenden and her research partners warn against turning their research into a diet, even if the link between the Hadza’s gut microbiome and their lower rates of gastrointetinal illness prove true. “Even if you try to emulate the diet of the Hadza, you’re not living in the environment,” explained Amanda Henry, a dietary ecologist from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and a co-author of the study. “There are transfers from the soils, from the animals.” In other words, it’s not just what the Hadza eat that contribute to their remarkable gut flora, it’s where and how they are eating it, too.
Among the communities of gut microbiomes that have been sampled — from Americans to Italians to Koreans to vegans — the Hadza’s is drastically different. But, what really surprised the researchers was how different the gut communities were between the sexes. The females had much higher levels of several bacteria known to break down fibrous veggies. Both sexes eat copious amounts of tuborous roots, the women do most of the digging, while the men hunt or collect honey. ”Even though both groups bring food back to camp, they both snack, so they both eat more of what they collect,” Henry said. For the research team, this was just more evidence of how much the gut biota can vary, even between people who spend their entire lives eating different quantities of roughly the same diet.
This research is provocative, but there is a lot more work before the many new questions it raises can bring us answers about the human gut. Henry says she’d like to get samples from more people, and across a broader swath of time. “We really need to look at how gut microbiomes vary by season,” she said.
via The Surprising Gut Microbes of African Hunter-Gatherers | Science | WIRED.







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