Did you ever comfort yourself with the thought that you can start over and change your eating habits anytime? Sadly, this is no longer an excuse. A new study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, shows that you and your children may not be able to recover from the harm inflicted by food deficient in fiber. Eating yogurts daily won't change anything, according to the report, once the damage is done.
Even when parent generations were put back on a high-fiber diet, the shortage of gut microbial diversity in younger generations remained in place. Switching successive generations back to a healthier diet didn't help either: it almost killed off essential gut microbes that once had flourished in ancestor generations.
"There are very few ecosystems where low species diversity is a good thing. There's no reason to think our gut is any exception," said the study's lead author, Erica Sonnenburg, PhD, a senior research scientist at Stanford, as cited by Science Daily.
Microbiotic population die-off may drive some of the trillions of species living in healthy human guts to the brink of extinction, scientists say. And if any disease arises from a depleted gut microbiome, consuming more fiber and a course of probiotics may not be enough to manage it.
