Gut microbes for the win!
We already know there’s a connection between your gut and your brain, but a recent study at Tulane University takes a step toward showing how your diet might turn your gut into your brain’s strength coach.
The researchers started by pitting subjects who ate the Mediterranean Diet against subjects who were fed a standard Western Diet for 14 weeks. What’s the Mediterranean Diet you ask? Fish & lean proteins, very little red meat & saturated fats, lots of fruits, veggies & whole grains, high fiber from plant sources, and olive oil as the main fat source. And the standard Western Diet? Lots of processed foods, refined grains, red meat & processed meat, high-sugar drinks, fried foods, butter, saturated fat, etc., etc., etc.
Now, these subjects happened to be rats, but don’t scurry away just yet. The researchers selected young rodents that would be similar to 18-year-old humans to focus on a key developmental life stage and their diets mimicked the complexity of human diets.
Team Mediterranean notched increases in 4 types of beneficial gut bacteria and decreases in 5 others vs. Team Western. They also had lower levels of bad LDL cholesterol and blitzed their way through maze challenges without even breaking into little rat sweats while the Western Diet rodents struggled with memory and learning and took forEVER to complete the same tasks.
Further testing is needed to see if these results translate to humans, but the Med Diet has already racked up a trophy case full of disease fighting, chronic illness snuffing accolades that a similar result wouldn’t exactly be the most surprising thing ever.
