Your microbiota may be more sensitive to additives

Your microbiota may be more sensitive to additives


Essential

  • Some people would have a microbiota more sensitive to food emulsifiers, while others would seem to have more resistant to the negative impacts of these additives.
  • A microbiota model, developed in the laboratory by French researchers, would predict the sensitivity of an adult to an emulsifying agent, via an analysis of his stool.
  • According to the authors, this discovery opens the way to a personalized nutrition approach based on the intestinal microbiota.

Vegetable milk, ice cream, crumb bread, crème fraîche … In these products found in supermarkets and that are consumed, we find emulsifiers, a type of food additives, used to allow them to keep them longer or improve their texture . Problem: these substances directly disturb the intestinal microbiota, thus promoting chronic intestinal inflammation in mice. “A controlled and randomized study (Functional Research on Emulsifiers in Humans, Fresh) revealed that carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) also had a negative impact on the intestinal microbiota in some healthy people, but not all”, Speed ​​scientists from INSERM, the University of Paris Cité and the CNRS, who led this research. Clearly, we are not all equal in the face of processed foods.

Some have a microbiota very reactive to emulsifiers present in processed foods

As part of new works, published in the journal Gutthe team wanted to establish an approach to predict the sensitivity of a person to food emulsifiers according to their basic microbiota. For this, she developed a laboratory microbiota model capable of reproducing the human microbiota. Then the authors tested the effect of carboxymethylcellulose in vitro on different microbiota. “Metagenomas have been analyzed to identify the signatures of sensitivity to emulsifiers.” According to the results, the exposure of human microbiota, maintained to this additive, summarized the differential sensitivity to the CMC observed previously in the participants of the Fresh study. Thus, a given microbiota can be either sensitive or resistant to this emulsifier.

In addition, the predicted sensitivity of a given microbiota could have been validated thanks to microbiota transfer approaches in a mouse model, with the observation that only microbiota predicted sensitive agents were indeed capable of leading to a Severe colitis in animals consuming carboxymethylcellulose. From samples of stools, the researchers found that “The disturbance of the microbiota induced by CMCs was associated with a basic metagenomic signature”.




A track for a personalized nutrition approach

According to Benoit Chassaing, who directed this recent research, these discoveries could be used in the near future in order to determine the sensitivity or resistance of a person to emulsifying agents, “And this in order to offer everyone a suitable nutritional program (…) detect this sensitivity in healthy people could, moreover, make it possible to avoid the occurrence of certain intestinal disorders and in sick patients, to prevent the progression of illness or alleviate the symptoms. “

















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