If you’ve ever taken a course of antibiotics, your infection might have cleared, but your gut might take longer to recover. That’s because the disease-fighting pills blast all of the bacteria in your gut, whether they’re helpful or not, and it can take time for this community to rebuild itself after completing a course of the medication. This can lead to gastrointestinal distress including diarrhea, gas, and other types of stomach upset. A researcher at the University of Chicago (UChicago) likens the effects of antibiotics to a forest fire in the gut and compares your diet to the way in which the ecosystem develops afterwards.
“The mammalian gut microbiome is like a forest, and when you damage it, it must have a succession of events that occur in a specific order to restore itself back to its former health,” said UChicago’s Eugene B. Chang. “When you are on a Western diet, this does not happen because it doesn’t provide the nutrients for the right microbes at the right time to recover. Instead, you end up with a few species that monopolize these resources, and don’t set the stage for other organisms that are required for recovery.”
Chang is the senior author on a study that looked at the effect diets might have on rebuilding the gut microbiome – the community of microbes living in the colon – after the sometimes devastating effects of antibiotics.
He and his team started with two groups of mice. One was fed food mimicking a typical Western-style diet (WD), which is to say it consisted of high-fat and low-fiber foods. The other group ate regular mouse chow (RC), which is low-fat and has a wide range of plant fiber, much like the Mediterranean diet.
The team then gave both groups of mice a course of antibiotics. Finally, in an attempt to restore their gut microbiomes to their pre-antibiotic states, they used fecal microbial transplants (FMT) in which feces from healthy mice who weren’t treated with antibiotics were introduced to the colons of the test subjects.
What they found was that the approach worked for the mice who were on the RC diet; their colons were able to allow the reestablishment of a wide range of beneficial bacteria that had been destroyed by the antibiotics. This was true for mice that were on the RC plan before antibiotic treatment as well as those who were on the WD plan before treatment and then switched to the RC plan afterwards.
However, for the mice who had been on the WD plan before and after antibiotic treatment, the FMT simply didn’t work; the colons of those mice were unable to reestablish a colony of helpful bacteria. What’s more, the researchers found that the mice on the WD plan were also more susceptible to Salmonella infections.
“It doesn’t seem to matter what microbes you’re putting into the community through FMT, even if it’s matched in every way possible to the ideal transplant,” said Megan Kennedy, a student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UChicago and lead author of the study. “If the mice are on the wrong diet, the microbes don’t stick, the community doesn’t diversify, and it doesn’t recover.”
“Food can be medicinal”
While the research was conducted on mice, the team believes the results should translate to humans and could be part of a plan to help patients recover more quickly from major procedures including cancer treatments and organ transplants when they are put on heavy-duty antibiotics.
“Maybe we can use diet to rebuild the commensal microbes that have been suppressed under these therapies,” said Chang. “We can restore the healthy microbiome much quicker and prevent the emergence of more multidrug-resistant organisms.”
Certainly cleaning up your diet a bit before undergoing a procedure requiring follow-up antibiotics, or after taking a course of the medication, couldn’t hurt. In addition to the potential to rebuild a healthy gut microbiome, eating more plant-based foods has also been found to reduce biological age, lower bad cholesterol levels, improve heart health, and better organize our brains, while a study earlier this year showed that swapping in vegetable oils for butter could lower our risk of dying by as much as 16%.
“I’ve become a believer that food can be medicinal,” Chang concluded. “In fact, I think that food can be prescriptive, because we can ultimately decide what food components are affecting which populations and functions of the gut microbiome.”
The new research has been published in the journal Nature.
Source: University of Chicago via EurekAlert
