Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

And that's become less successful over time as we've moved into this era of inflammatory Western diseases and largely moved out of the era of infectious diseases, at least infectious bacterial diseases, that this paradigm of waiting for diseases to appear and come into the clinic

is not really very effective in the context of inflammatory western diseases autoimmune diseases metabolic syndrome heart diseases and inflammatory disease you know the list goes on and on and so we started to think a lot about like how can we get out in front of this how can we think about like preventative ways of dealing with this crisis of metabolic and inflammatory diseases

And this tremendous, beautiful body of literature started to come forward in the field that showed that the gut microbiome is absolutely critical to modulating our immune status.

So if you change the microbiome, you can fundamentally change how the immune system operates.

And we know that the immune system is at the basis of a lot of these diseases, inflammatory chronic diseases.

And so it brought up this possibility that maybe the fact that we're not nourishing this community well enough, maybe the fact that it's deteriorated over time,

due to all of the things that go along with an industrialized lifestyle, antibiotics and so forth.

Maybe we have a microbiome right now in the industrialized world that is setting our immune system at a set point, simmering inflammation that's driving us towards these inflammatory diseases.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if we could figure out how to, you know,

use diet specifically, but just kind of learn the rules of how to reconfigure both the composition and function of our gut microbiome so that inflammation was different in our bodies, so that each one of us was less likely to go on and to develop an inflammatory disease.

Our flagship study, we wanted to understand if we put people on a high fiber diet,

how would that affect their microbiome and immune system?

And if we put them on a high fermented food diet, a diet rich in live microbes and all the metabolites that are present from fermentation in foods, how would that change microbiome and immune system?

The idea was in the case of the high fiber diet, just increasing plant-based fiber.

So can you eat more whole grains, more legumes, more vegetables, nuts, get the fiber up in the range of, you know, from 15 to 20 grams per day up to over 40 grams per day?

So can you kind of double or more the amount of fiber that you eat per day?

The people that were eating the high fermented food diet, they were instructed to basically eat, you know, foods that you could buy at a grocery store that were naturally fermented and contain live microbes.

yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi.

We instructed people to eat non-sweetened yogurts.

A huge pitfall in this area is you can have a yogurt loaded with bacteria, kind of the base of what's healthy, and then a ton of artificial flavoring and sugar loaded on top of that.