It’s been evident for a while that men and women respond to diet differently. Men slim down easier than women, men need more calories than women due to muscle mass, there are even variations in eating styles.
Now, new research led through the University of Texas at Austin reveals that even our gut microbes react differently to the diet, even if that diet is exactly the same.
The findings, published in Nature Communication, indicate that therapies designed to improve health insurance and treat disease through nutrition need to be targeted at each gender.
The information for this study was collected from the gut microbes of mice and two types of fish. The team also performed an in-depth analysis of data collected on humans by previous research teams. In fish, as well as in humans, they learned that diet affected the microbiota of men and women in various manners. For instance, in some instances, different species of microbes would dominate. In other instances, one sex would have a higher diversity of bacteria than the other.
Scientists only have recently begun to understand the vital role played through the human microbiome, featuring its all the bacteria living in or on the person’s body. The gut microbiome alone consists of hundreds, or maybe thousands, of various types of microbes, each varying by the bucket load.
Human health could be affected in a very real way through the variety and number of microbes within the gut, which is based on a mixture of genetics and diet. Scientific study has been able to link obesity, diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease to low diversity of bacteria within the human gut.
A great deal still needs to be understood about which species, or mixture of species, is the best for human health. To gain this information, scientists have to know how various combinations of diet, genetics and environment affect the microbes. Unfortunately, most studies concentrate on a single factor and do not account for how the variables interact.
“Our study asks not just how diet influences the microbiome, however it splits the hosts into men and women and asks, do males show the same diet effects as females?” said Daniel Bolnick, professor within the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Natural Sciences.
Despite identifying the gender variations in gut microbiota, the information used for this research doesn’t lend itself to specific diet tips because it is organized into complex clusters of disparate factors.
“To guide people’s behavior, we have to understand what microbes are desirable for people,” said Bolnick. “Diet and sex do interact to help the microbes, but we don’t yet understand what an appealing target for microbes is. Now we are able to go in with eyes open when we focus on therapies for gut microbe problems, as numerous involve dietary changes. We can enter those studies looking for something we weren’t conscious of before. All along we treated diet as though it works the same for men and ladies. Now we’ll be approaching studies of therapies in different ways.”
Still it isn’t clear why males and females would have different reactions to alterations in diet, but a couple of possibilities promote themselves. For just one, the endocrine system associated with gender could influence gut microbes, pushing the body’s environment to favor one strain over another. Another explanation could be based in the fact that the sexes differ in how their immune systems function, which could change which microbes live and die in the gut microbiome.
Bolnick notes the one exception in the study was in the mice. They found a tiny distinction between men and women, as well as the most part, the gut microbiomes of both sexes responded to diet very much the same. This finding, which raises questions about how well mice studies could be generalized with other species, could have a great impact on future studies, as most dietary scientific studies are conducted on mice.
“Which means that most of the research that’s being done on lab mice – we have to treat by using kid gloves,” said Bolnick.
