Is The Secret To A Healthier Microbiome Hidden In The Hadza Diet?
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, focuses on a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, called Hadza.
Their diet consists almost entirely of food they find in the forest, including wild berries, fiber-rich tubers, honey and wild meat. They basically eat no processed food — or even food that comes from farms.
"They are a very special group of people," Sonnenburg says. "There are only about 2,200 left and really only about 200 that exclusively adhere to hunting and gathering."
Sonnenberg and his colleagues analyzed 350 stool samples from Hadza people taken over the course of about a year. They then compared the bacteria found in Hadza with those found in 17 other cultures around the world, including other hunter-gatherer communities in Venezuela and Peru and subsistence farmers in Malawi and Cameroon.
The trend was clear: The further away people's diets are from a Western diet, the greater the variety of microbes they tend to have in their guts. And that includes bacteria that are missing from American guts.
"So whether it's people in Africa, Papua New Guinea or South America, communities that live a traditional lifestyle have common gut microbes — ones that we all lack in the industrialized world," Sonnenburg says.
In a way, the Western diet — low in fiber and high in refined sugars — is basically wiping out species of bacteria from our intestines.
