Research

Mixed

Gut microbiome composition (specifically enterotype) mediates the relationship between dietary intake (fiber, artificial sweeteners) and circulating metabolites (bile acids), meaning the metabolic response to diet is dependent on an individual's microbial profile.

Your gut bacteria determine how your diet affects your blood chemistry. For example, eating fiber might increase beneficial bile acids in some people but not others, depending on their specific gut microbial type (enterotype). This suggests that personalized nutrition, based on microbiome profiling, may be necessary to optimize metabolic health, as standard dietary advice may not yield the same metabolic benefits for everyone.

ModerateConditionalMEDIUM confidence
Intake of plant-derived nutrients as well as consumption of artificial sweeteners were associated with significant differences in circulating metabolites, particularly bile acids, which were dependent on gut enterotype, indicating that microbiome composition mediates the effect of diet on host physiology.
Zheng-Zheng Tang et al. · Frontiers in Genetics · 2019

Why this rating

Cross-sectional observational study; establishes association and mediation but not causation.

Source

Multi-Omic Analysis of the Microbiome and Metabolome in Healthy Subjects Reveals Microbiome-Dependent Relationships Between Diet and Metabolites

Zheng-Zheng Tang et al. · Frontiers in Genetics · 2019

DOI 10.3389/fgene.2019.00454

cross_sectional · n=150Cited 171×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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