Higher alpha diversity in the gut microbiome is generally considered better, provided there is a low abundance of detrimental bacteria like Proteobacteria.

“I think if you asked any number of world experts, and I certainly ask this of Dr. Sonnenburg, what is a healthy microbiome, they're all going to tell you it's a microbiome that has a lot of diversity, that includes a lot of different types of bacteria.”

“but we know in the context of the gut, and for people living in the industrialized world, higher diversity is generally better.”

“the diversity of the gut microbiota is certainly thought be a good thing however you know we have a mutual friend who we know he has a high biodiversity in his gut but all of it is those bad actors that we talked about earlier so you can have in a very diverse set of criminals that you that you have hanging out in your gut so diversity itself doesn't necessarily tell you anything”

“we know that a diverse microbiome is not in and of itself indicative of a quote healthy microbiome because we can we can have lots of Proteobacteria or other parameters aerobic organisms that can be pathogenic that are that are causing it to look like there's diversity but it's not really a good collection of”

“and so we generally want or in studies it looks like a higher alpha diversity is generally better typically as we know right you can have a high alpha diversity with a bunch of proteobacteria bunch of bad actors but if you have low proteobacteria or you have low bad actors generally a higher alpha diversity is better right generally yeah”