A select "guild" of gut bacteria responsible for the benefits of high-fiber diets in type 2 diabetes has been identified in a study in which those patients on the high-fiber diet showed improved control of HbA1c.
Effectively, eating the right dietary fibers may rebalance the gut microbiome and lead to reduced blood sugar and body weight, and may pave the way for a new nutritional approach to preventing and managing type 2 diabetes, say the researchers.
The specific bacteria thought to be effective produce short chain fatty acids (SCFAs).
"Targeted promotion of the active SCFA producers...via personalized nutrition may present a novel ecological approach for manipulating the gut microbiota to manage type 2 diabetes and potentially other dysbiosis-related diseases," write the authors led by Liping Zhao, PhD, from the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, New Jersey.
The research was conducted in China, and was published in the March 9 issue of Science.
However, separately, in an article published online November 1, 2017, in Gut, a whole-grain diet failed to alter insulin sensitivity and the gut microbiome in healthy individuals at risk for development of metabolic syndrome. But the high-fiber diet did lead to lower body weight and less systemic low-grade inflammation.
Certain Fibers Could Become Part of the Treatment for Type 2 Diabetes
In their paper, Zhao and colleagues explain that gut microbes play a range of roles in response to food intake, and they suggest that chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, may in part result from a deficiency in SCFA production from carbohydrate fermentation in the gut.