Abstract
The modern Paleolithic diet (MPD), featured by the consumption of vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish and lean meat, while excluding grains, dairy products, salt and refined sugar, has gained substantial public attention in recent years because of its potential multiple health benefits. However, to date little is known about the actual impact of this dietary pattern on the gut microbiome (GM) and its implications for human health. In the current scenario where Western diets, low in fiber while rich in industrialized and processed foods, are considered one of the leading causes of maladaptive GM changes along human evolution, likely contributing to the increasing incidence of chronic non-communicable diseases, we hypothesize that the MPD could modulate the Western GM towards a more “ancestral” configuration. In an attempt to shed light on this, here we profiled the GM structure of urban Italian subjects adhering to the MPD, and compared data with other urban Italians following a Mediterranean Diet (MD), as well as worldwide traditional hunter-gatherer populations from previous publications. Notwithstanding a strong geography effect on the GM structure, our results show an unexpectedly high degree of biodiversity in MPD subjects, which well approximates that of traditional populations. The GM of MPD individuals also shows some peculiarities, including a high relative abundance of bile-tolerant and fat-loving microorganisms. The consumption of plant-based foods–albeit with the exclusion of grains and pulses–along with the minimization of the intake of processed foods, both hallmarks of the MPD, could therefore contribute to partially rewild the GM but caution should be taken in adhering to this dietary pattern in the long term.
Highlights
In order to understand the specificities of the human microbiome assembly, extensive metaanalyses of human and non-human primate microbiomes have been recently carried out [1,2]
51.65% of total calories are from monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs), 30.93% from saturated fatty acids (SFAs) and 17.42% from polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) (Fig 1B)
We compared the gut microbiome (GM) compositional structure and diversity of urban Italian adults adhering to the Modern Paleolithic Diet (MPD) with previously published data from urban Italian adults largely adhering to the Mediterranean Diet (MD) [5,23] and traditional hunter-gatherers, including Hadza from Tanzania [5], Matses from Peru [6], and Inuit from Canada [24]
Summary
In order to understand the specificities of the human microbiome assembly, extensive metaanalyses of human and non-human primate microbiomes have been recently carried out [1,2] This comparative approach has led to the identification of several compositional changes along with a progressive reduction of biodiversity as the main distinctive features of the human gut microbiome (GM) along the evolutionary history [1]. In recent years, a large body of research has been devoted to understanding the mechanisms leading to the alterations in the Western urban GM It is in this scenario that the multiple-hit hypothesis has been advanced [8]. Food additives, emulsifiers and xenobiotics–ubiquitous in industrially processed foods–have recently been shown as important additional drivers of GM diversity shrinkage [13]
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