Research
Mixed
Dietary interventions (resistant starch, non-starch polysaccharides, or weight-loss) induce distinct but relatively minor changes in intestinal microbiota composition compared to strong inter-individual baseline differences.
Diet changes your gut bacteria, but your starting microbiota matters more than the specific diet. If you have high baseline diversity, you might be a 'responder' with distinct changes; if low, you might be a 'non-responder' with stable microbiota. Don't expect diet to be the sole master switch.
GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
The diet explained around 10% of the total variance in microbiota composition, which was substantially less than the inter-individual variance. Yet, each of the study diets induced clear and distinct changes in the microbiota.
Why this rating
Randomized crossover design with 14 subjects, deep sequencing (microarray), and qPCR validation.
Source
Impact of diet and individual variation on intestinal microbiota composition and fermentation products in obese men
Anne Salonen et al. · The ISME Journal · 2014
DOI 10.1038/ismej.2014.63
crossover · n=14Cited 622×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- High baseline microbiota diversity is associated with being a 'responder' to dietary interventions, whereas low diversity is associated with being a 'non-responder'.Good
- Resistant Starch (RS) diets increase Ruminococcus bromii and decrease Lachnospiraceae, while Non-Starch Polysaccharides (NSP) increase Lachnospiraceae and decrease Ruminococcus.Good
Related findings · Mixed
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