Paper published! Gut microbes don’t confer benefits of exercise in protecting against poor diet.

Exercise keeps you healthy. It even help mitigate the negative metabolic effects of a poor diet (though I would not suggest you use it to excuse a poor diet). The gut microbiome responds to diet and can impact the host’s metabolism. We asked whether the microbiome was the mediator through which exercise can help counter the negative effects of a high fat, high sucrose diet. This study was performed in mice, with transfer of faecal material from donors fed norman and unhealthy diets into normal-fed recipients. In this particular case, no, these protective effects are not mediated through the gut microbiome. Interestingly, the gut microbiome did transfer some negative metabolic effects, but not to the point of altering host body composition (e.g. fat). My role on this project was microbiome analysis, and using machine learning to find microbial signatures indicative of exercise and diet status in recipients - yes, each produced a unique signature that persisted through the faecal transfers.

We published this work in the prestigious American Journal of Physiology Endocrinology and Metabolism. [The paper can be found here.]