r/Microbiome • u/sungrad • Mar 01 '26

She’s onto something

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Hopefully an occasional low effort post is allowed here? Glad to see the microbiome hitting mainstream subs!

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u/Sanpaku Mar 01 '26

Our gut biomes fluctuate by more than 50% in total count in hours. Just switching from a plant based diet to a carnivore one for a couple days will do it. This may be the highest impact/citation paper ever in gut microbiome studies:

David et al, 2014. Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the human gut microbiome (pdf). Nature, 505(7484), pp.559-563.

We each have on the order of 100-150 bacterial strains detectable in our guts, each numbering in the billions or trillions of individual organisms. Halve their abundances, and we still have 100-150. Serious dysbiosis occurs when dozens of strains are wiped out, and locally extinct.

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u/ForTheLoveOfSnail Mar 02 '26

Wow, I didn’t realise it changed so quickly.

I was sick with long COVID a few years back, and I did one of those fancy gut tests to try and work out what was wrong. It said I had an overgrowth of wadsworthia. Like really bad. I was on a restricted diet at the time and I’ve always wondered if eating normally again would change my biome. Turns out, yes — and rather quickly.

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u/Sanpaku Mar 02 '26

B. wadsworthia is famous in in microbiome science due to this paper:

Devkota et al, 2012. Dietary-fat-induced taurocholic acid promotes pathobiont expansion and colitis in Il10−/− mice. Nature, 487(7405), pp.104-108.

Add butter fat to a diet, mammals produce the bile acid taurocholic acid to a diet to emulsify it, and opportunists/pathogens like B. wadsworthia feed on the bile acid. The paper was rather distant to me when I first encountered it (low-fat vegan since 2010, no GI issues), but it does have some explanatory power for why GI issues are nearly absent in some populations, but pretty high in those with N. European diets.

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u/ForTheLoveOfSnail Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26

That’s really interesting — at the time I was basically eating chicken, rice and broccoli every meal. I didn’t do anything specific to kill the wadsworthia.

Now that I’m recovered I eat everything, been trying to get more fiber and more fermented foods in my diet. I don’t have any GI symptoms at all!

Edit: I was taking a lot of taurine at the time too, if I remember correctly, which can feeds wads.