Soy and Frequent Dairy Consumption with Subsequent Equol Production Reveals Decreased Gut Health in a Cohort of Healthy Puerto Rican Women.

Mercedes Y Lacourt-Ventura,Filipa Godoy-Vitorino,Luis A Cubano,Suranganie Dharmawardhane,Johanna Maysonet,Delmarie Rivera-Rodríguez,Yelitza Ruiz,Michelle M Martínez-Montemayor,Abel Baerga-Ortiz,Gerónimo Maldonado-Martínez,Johanna W Lampe,Robert Hunter-Mellado,Raysa Rosario-Acevedo,Christine Miranda,Darlene Vargas,Brayan Vilanova-Cuevas

doi:10.3390/ijerph18168254

Abstract

The U.S. Hispanic female population has one of the highest breast cancer (BC) incidence and mortality rates, while BC is the leading cause of cancer death in Puerto Rican women. Certain foods may predispose to carcinogenesis. Our previous studies indicate that consuming combined soy isoflavones (genistein, daidzein, and glycitein) promotes tumor metastasis possibly through increased protein synthesis activated by equol, a secondary dietary metabolite. Equol is a bacterial metabolite produced in about 20–60% of the population that harbor and exhibit specific gut microbiota capable of producing it from daidzein. The aim of the current study was to investigate the prevalence of equol production in Puerto Rican women and identify the equol producing microbiota in this understudied population. Herein, we conducted a cross-sectional characterization of equol production in a clinically based sample of eighty healthy 25–50 year old Puerto Rican women. Urine samples were collected and evaluated by GCMS for the presence of soy isoflavones and metabolites to determine the ratio of equol producers to equol non-producers. Furthermore, fecal samples were collected for gut microbiota characterization on a subset of women using next generation sequencing (NGS). We report that 25% of the participants were classified as equol producers. Importantly, the gut microbiota from equol non-producers demonstrated a higher diversity. Our results suggest that healthy women with soy and high dairy consumption with subsequent equol production may result in gut dysbiosis by having reduced quantities (diversity) of healthy bacterial biomarkers, which might be associated to increased diseased outcomes (e.g., cancer, and other diseases).

Highlights

For the past decade, there has been a trend to use functional foods to improve health.The term functional food is used to describe a food or food ingredient that contains non-Int
Alpha richness analysis using the Chao1 metric for both dairy consumption and concatenated equol production presented no significant differences, (Figure 5B), when analyzing dairy consumption alone, we found that women who rarely consumed dairy displayed a richer microbiota than women who consumed dairy regularly p < 0.04)
Our previous findings using in vitro and and in in vivo vivo cancer models suggest that the intake of combined soy isoflavones (genistein, daidzein, cancer suggest the intake of combined soy isoflavones glycitein) can can promote promote cancer cancer cell cell proliferation, proliferation, tumor tumor progression, progression, metastasis, metastasis, and and upregulation of oncogenes [9]

Summary

Objectives

The aim of the current study was to investigate the prevalence of equol production in Puerto Rican women and identify the equol producing microbiota in this understudied population. For the first time, the prevalence of equol production in a group of healthy. Contrary to previous studies [34], in the current study, we did not perform a soy challenge in our subjects, because we aimed to assess equol production only by the usual diet consumed by healthy participants

Results

Discussion

Conclusion