by Dr M Balasubramanyam PhD, FAMS, MNASc, FAPASc, FASCh, June 27, 2024
On the occasion of World Microbiome Day (27th June), let’s come together to share our passion and knowledge about microbiomes and their value to humanity and the planet, says the author.
World Microbiome Day is organized by APC Microbiome Ireland, a world leading Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) research center and the European Food Information Council (EUFIC) with a focus on celebrating, advocating and popularizing the microbiome’s remarkable role in our lives. Since 2020, World Microbiome Day (WMD) is globally celebrated on June 27th, with a specific theme each year. WMD 2024 theme is ‘Feed your gut microbiome’.
Microorganisms (also called microbes, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, archaea, etc.) are pretty much everywhere. Microscopically, they live in and on plants, animals, water, soil, food and humans. Within each of those habitats, microorganisms form communities are referred to ask ‘microbiomes’. Together microbiomes are actively contributing to clean environments, sustaining food systems, mitigating climate change and keeping people healthy. In this way, microbes help us reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In the gut, microbes are responsible for the following:
- Harvesting energy from foods
- Improving gut motility and function
- Reinforcing gut barrier
- Protecting against pathogens
- Producing metabolites that are important for health
- Synthesizing vitamins and hormones
In the context of human microbiomes, researchers are uncovering more and more about what are these microbiomes and what they do, and why microbiome diversity is important for health and how it gets altered and linked to a variety of human disease-sates.
Gut connection to diseases
Ever since, the National Institute of Health (USA) launched the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) in the year 2007 to study the microbial communities associated with the human body, there are accumulating evidences that gut microbiome alterations are tightly linked to the pathogenesis of several disease-states including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, fatty liver, cancer, neurogenerative disorders and many others. The ‘gut connection’ to type 2 diabetes received even more attention in recent years because of the fact that there is an intricate relationship between intestinal microbiota and development of metabolic diseases with special reference to diabetes. Our recent landmark studies from the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation clearly demonstrated that specific gut microbiome alterations do occur as early as in the state of prediabetes and play a major role in the genesis and natural history of diabetes and its complications -says Balasubramanyam.
The science on the role of the gut microbiota in diabetes has recently been consolidated from a recent international expert forum organized by Diabetes, Diabetes Care, and Diabetologia, which was held at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes 2023 Annual Meeting in Hamburg, Germany. The conclusions from this forum includes the following:
- The gut microbiota may be involved in the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes, as microbially produced metabolites associate both positively and negatively with the disease
- Mechanistic links of GM functions (for example, genes for butyrate production) with glucose metabolism have recently emerged through the use of Mendelian randomisation in humans
- Large cohorts and a deep-sequencing metagenomic approach are required for robust assessments of associations and causation
- Future studies should consider repeated measures within individuals
- Need for identifying chemical compounds resulting from microbiome and gut microbe–host co-metabolic processes, as well as proteins and peptides, that could influence human host biology
- Need for determining the functional role of gut microbes, metabolites, and proteins detected in the intestine and plasma in the chain of causal pathophysiological mechanisms leading to diabetes and associated conditions. More importantly, the forum also emphasized that it’s important to address what extent gut microbiome signatures linked to diabetes are modifiable (e.g. through diet or intervention with probiotics and metabolites) to prevent or mitigate disease.
It’s your diet that shapes your gut microbiome diversity
It is now very clear that diet plays a significant role in shaping the microbiome, with experiments showing that dietary alterations can induce large, temporary microbial shifts within 24 h. Given this association, there may be significant therapeutic utility in altering microbial composition through diet.
Emerging research implies that consumption of particular types of food produces predictable shifts in existing host bacterial genera. Furthermore, the identity of these bacteria affects host immune and metabolic parameters, with broad implications for human health. Diet influences the composition and function of the gut microbiota through alterations in gene expression, enzymatic activity, and metabolome.
Choose MAC (microbiota-accessible carbohydrates) diet (!) to enrichen your Gut Microbiome
Increasing evidence indicates that modern lifestyle and diet transition has led to a substantial depletion of the human gut microbiome. We must know that the food we eat plays an essential role in maintaining the richness and function of our gut microbiota.Much of the carbon and energy sources needed for the survival of the members of the gut microbiota originate from plant- and animal-derived dietary carbohydrates and plant fibers (resistant to degradation and absorption by the host).
The complex carbohydrate portion of dietary fiber that can be metabolized by gut microbes (to produce therapeutic short chain fatty acids), were referred by the term “microbiota-accessible carbohydrate” (MAC). ‘Modern diet consists of heavily processed foods, rich in fat, sugar, protein, and a variety of additives, while remaining low in micronutrients and dietary fiber – that means our modern society consumes MAC-deprived diet. Therefore, if you want to be healthy enough and disease-free, choose MAC diet’ – says the author.
Sonnenburg, a microbiome scientist at Stanford University who studies the microbiomes in the hunter-gatherer populations says that our indigenous microbiomes are in crisis & slowly becoming extinct—casualties of an increasingly sanitized, industrialized, and antimicrobial way of present day life. Therefore, it’s important to take proactive actions to save our ancestry microbiome.
In this context, it is appreciable that concrete research plans are underway by groups such as the Global Microbiome Conservancy to save the microbiome that we are losing from around the world – by studying the gut microbiome alterations in diverse and underrepresented populations from more than 30 countries worldwide, including those from ancestral ways of life such as hunter-gatherer populations.
To conclude:
“Better health (as well as disease prevention and management) may not directly be related to how rich you are (financially)… but it’s going to be related to how rich you are in your gut microbiome”! – says Balasubramanyam. Therefore, the timely advice for both the general public and the patients is this– ‘stock up on your good gut bacteria and bring back your microbiome paradise’.
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