Rhonda Patrick· PhD
That's a great question, and to be honest, I think that our very young field is only beginning to mechanistically unravel these complex effects. And there are many different types of effects by which micro and macronutrients in our diet could impact our microbes. For example, some of our nutritional inputs could serve as an energy source to microbes, and some microbes would preferentially digest some but not other components of our diets. As you may imagine, there may be a competitive advantage to some microbes over others depending on the diet that they're exposed to. Other impacts could relate to an even more enigmatic part of the microbiome which is bacteria-bacteria communications. And we increasingly know that we have trillions of bacteria in our gut and these form ecosystems or communities in which they are very marked and poorly understood communication channels between different bacteria that determine who would survive, who would flourish, and who would not. And these also in many interesting aspects relate to signals that are obtained from our diet. And a third example of how diet composition could impact our microbes relates to the host, and many of our dietary components are sensed or are absorbed by the host, which changes its behavior in response to these compounds. And the host could be, you know, regarded as a very sophisticated incubator that houses all of these microbes, and by changing its behaviors or its conditions, the host in response to diet could change the relative composition and function of different microbes over others.