Plant-based diets are good for you. They promote gut, immune, metabolic and cardiovascular health, in part by cultivating a diverse community of intestinal bacteria. These benefits have long been known to stem partly from the fiber in plant-based foods, which is processed by our commensal gut bacteria, and the often brightly colored “phytochemicals” plants produce to protect themselves from environmental threats. But much remains to be learned about how exactly the bugs in our bellies process the constituents of vegetables to such salubrious effect.
A pair of studies led by Ludwig Princeton’s Jenna AbuSalim and director Joshua Rabinowitz—one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the other published in Nature Metabolism—shed new light on the matter.
One study reveals that plant fibers and proteins reprogram microbial metabolism to boost production of a healthful class of metabolites while suppressing that of their harmful counterparts. The other demonstrates that many physiologically important metabolites generally attributed to intestinal microbes are, in fact, also produced abundantly by mammalian metabolism.
