Regularly eating fruit, vegetables and grains has a role in creating a healthy gut microbiota that is just as important as what you eat, a new AI-powered study has found.
The findings, which add weight to campaigns such as the ‘five a day’ message, have provided evidence that the regularity of which healthy food is consumed plays an equally vital role in building a healthy gut microbiota.
Associate Professor Marcel Salathé, head of the Digital Epidemiology Lab and co-director of the AI Center at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, said: “This research clearly shows that you cannot binge on vegetables on your healthy day and then eat in an unhealthy way for the rest of the week or month.
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“In fact, our study suggests that irregular consumption of healthy foods undoes many of their beneficial effects on the gut microbiota.”
Gut microbiota, which includes bacteria, viruses, fungi, can be found in the digestive system. Past studies have demonstrated that eating lots of fruit, vegetables, fibre and nuts is linked with microbial diversity and good stomach health.
The second part of the AI-powered study, in collaboration with the University of California, San Diego, demonstrated how a stool sample and machine learning can be used to show that gut bacteria and what someone eats can predict each other with up to 85% accuracy.
Associate Professor Salathé explained: “Getting such data from a stool sample is relatively easy, but understanding someone’s diet is notoriously difficult, it’s data that’s been challenging to collect.”
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Lead author Rohan Singh, a Doctoral Assistant in the Digital Epidemiology Lab, said: “Historically, nutrition research has relied on food frequency questionnaires and 24-hour dietary recalls. In theory, you could ask somebody to write down everything they eat but in practice it’s just not done because it’s borderline impossible. Now, the AI is so good that we can do this data collection at a large scale.
“Our study has been particularly interesting because when you look at lifestyle-oriented gastrointestinal disorders, they often develop gradually. Since nutrition is one of the big contributors to these diseases, analyses like ours may be able to assess what can be improved in a person’s diet. AI can then help nudge people to adjust their food intake accordingly.”
Read more in Nature Communications
