Is our gut metabolically flexible? In this article, Jonathan Sholl, Lucy Mailing, and Thomas Wood challenge the assumptions that only diets high in fiber are beneficial and high-fat diets are detrimental to our gut microbiome. Instead, they argue our microbiome can be metabolically flexible as long as our food choices consist of whole, natural foods.
Metabolic flexibility, they explain, “is the evolved ability to shift our metabolism to changes in dietary intake: to burn and use carbohydrates when they are plentiful and to turn dietary fat or stored body fat into ketones for energy when food or carbohydrates are scarce. Consequently, it seems likely that our guts also exhibit the flexibility to adapt to changing food sources rather than suffer significant gut dysfunction whenever fiber is absent.”
The authors suggest a new framework for testing their hypotheses, potential roles of alternative fuel sources for the gut microbiota, and challenges to the belief that high-fat foods may be linked to disease. They also address some likely objections to their claims.
Reframing Nutritional Microbiota Studies To Reflect an Inherent Metabolic Flexibility of the Human Gut: a Narrative Review Focusing on High-Fat Diets