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5 September 2016

Red wine and chocolate on the menu!

Welcome to My Bugs And I!

Thank you very much to all new readers for subscribing during the Summer Break Giveaway, I hope you find my articles interesting; they are all amazing stories about what our microbiota (microscopic world living on and in us) do for us to keep us safe and sane.

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Melissa Lee, Melissa Crowe, and Adrian Bold
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As a new school year begins all over the world, let's look at an academic study that showed that red wine and chocolate are good for you. Oh yes, let's...

Something that we've discussed in previous posts is that the more diverse your gut flora is (higher number of different species), the lesser your risk of developing various diseases. Another thing is that everyone's composition of species is unique, and it makes it very difficult to say this or that species is essential to be healthy!!

Now, a large study on thousands of people, and their poo (where our gut species end up eventually), came up with what influences our gut flora's diversity: 31 intrinsic factors, 12 diseases, 19 drug groups, 4 smoking categories, and 60 dietary factors that can explain 18.7% of the variation seen in the interindividuality of microbial composition.


Among those factors, we'll be happy to know that drinking coffee, tea, red wine was associated with increased diversity. Drinking buttermilk was also shown to be good as it was associated with abundance of two species commonly used in fermentation.

As expected, no need to stress that sweetened drinks and other alcohols are definitely not good.

I was surprised to see, however, that whole fat milk is contributing to lower microbial diversity: whole milk is recommended for infants between the ages of 1 and 2, so I guess there's a bit of risk-benefit balance to play there.

Another good news is that the absence of calprotectin in people's poo (a good thing), was associated with consumption of veggies, plant proteins, chocolate, and bread; while its presence was associated with high BMI, diabetes, use of statins and metformin (again, let's weigh the risk-benefit balance), and systolic blood pressure.

As for everything, all in good measures!

Want to know the basics on how to promote a healthy gut, follow me here and here!

What do you do to influence your high gut flora diversity?

See you next Monday!

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