I don’t know who said “you are what you eat,” but it really doesn’t make sense. I am objectively not made of peanut butter and coffee, though I’m certain that would be my fate if the sentiment were true. That said, the general idea — that what we eat matters — seems to hold more and more weight as studies of our diet pile up. Now, researchers say there’s yet another wrinkle to the question of what to eat, one rooted in the complexities of the microbiome.
In a recent study in Cell Host & Microbiome, a research team led by Abigail Johnson and Dan Knights at the University of Minnesota looked to see if they could tie specific foods to specific gut microbes, the diverse bacteria that live in your gut and help you digest your food. They found lots of associations between the two, and by the end of the study, found they could make predictions about which species of bacteria would increase or decrease after a person ate a given food.
However, which bacteria were associated with a given food were totally different from person to person — even for the same foods. And even for the same microbes. They couldn’t predict one person’s gut response based on another person’s data.
