Meat-Heavy Western Diets May Be Taking Away Our Ability to Digest Plants, Study Suggests

Watching American sitcoms while in a middle-class Indian family, you come to learn two things about the West: they love their meat, while their children hate their vegetables. However, observing and relating are two separate things, and growing up on a wide variety of delectable Indian vegetarian dishes makes the latter quite difficult, even if you revere our country’s non-vegetarian cuisine. And as Zomato’s CEO explained, India does have the highest percentage of vegetarians globally, making plants an inescapable part of our diet.

However, for the industrialised and “developed” West that has been observing a prolonged shift towards more meat and fewer vegetables, there might be new trouble in gut paradise. Scientists have discovered that the lack of fibre in western diets might be affecting the way their guts digest tough plant matter.

Like any other animal, our stomachs house diverse colonies of microbes that help break down our food into digestible components that our body can incorporate. However, for decades, we weren’t aware of any human gut microorganisms that could digest cellulose, until a study revealed a group of pertinent bacteria in 2003.

And now, using these bacteria as a genetic reference, researchers scourged through human faecal samples to assess the gut microbiome of humans from a wide range of times and regions. From the stool samples of farmers to hunter-gatherers to 1,000-2,000-year-old ancient humans, no poop was left unturned.

"These findings collectively imply a decline of these species in the human gut, likely influenced by the shift toward westernised lifestyles," the study’s authors explained. They believe that these Ruminococcus microbes may have lost ready access to their beloved fibre-rich diets, causing their numbers to dwindle in the guts of city folk. This may be compromising the humans’ ability to process plant matter, and worsening their metabolic health.

Studies have long shown that industrialised societies might be eating too less fibre, leading to adverse health outcomes. Luckily, creating “cellulose supplements” to counteract this problem seems easy enough, and initial research has already yielded positive outcomes for human gut health. However, more research is needed to fully understand these cellulose microbe-human health links, before our guts become terrible real estate for our gut microbes to adjust to.

The findings of this research have been published in Science and can be accessed here.

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