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Impact of Gut Microbiota on Blood Lipids Improvement Based on a Weight-loss Dietary Intervention
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In a study published online in Clinical Nutrition, LI Yixue and LIN Xu's teams from Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and ZENG Rong's team from Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of CAS, revealed the important role of diet-induced changes of gut microbiota on dyslipidemia.
In recent years, gut microbiota, known as a “super organ” of the human body, has been shown to play important roles in development and alleviation of obesity and related cardiometabolic diseases in human and animal studies. However, evidence from intervention trials is still limited. Thus, this study aims to explore whether dietary interventions can affect structure and function of gut microbiota and how changed gut microbiota influences blood lipid profile.
In a 12-week feeding intervention trial, LIN’ team has found that both non-calorie-restricted low-carbohydrate (LC) diet and a traditional high-carbohydrate diet with 35% energy reduction comparably reduced bodyweight, but only LC diet showed additional benefits on blood lipid profile in overweight/obese Chinese women.
Based on the samples and data of this trial, LI and LIN's teams and ZENG's team further measured the changes of metagenomics and targeted-metabolomics by using the samples collected in baseline and 12-week after intervention. They discovered for the first time that different weight-loss diets caused different changes in structure and function of gut microbiota, as well as participant’s blood levels of fatty acids and acylcarnitines.
Stepwise regression analysis showed that the changes in a series of co-abundance gene clusters (CAG) of gut microbiota, as well as blood fatty acids and acylcarnitines, were found to be significantly associated with improved blood high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) and triglycerides. Besides, changes in CAGs made greater contributions to elevated HDL levels and reduced triglycerides levels than contributions made by changes in fatty acids and acylcarnitines.
This study provides novel evidence to uncover that different diet-induced changes of gut microbiota might exert greater impact than altered host metabolism on improved dyslipidemia, supporting the important role of the complex “diet-microbiota-host” interactions on cardiometabolic health.
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