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Eating a plant-based diet enhanced the good bacteria living in the gut by up to 7 percent as compared to 0.5 percent from eating a Western diet. Using an animal model, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center designed the study to mimic human Western- and Mediterranean-type diets that could be controlled and analyzed over a sustained period of time.
In the pre-clinical study, non-human primates were randomized to either Western or Mediterranean diet groups and studied for 30 months. The Western diet consisted of lard, beef tallow, butter, eggs, cholesterol, high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose, while the Mediterranean diet consisted of fish oil, olive oil, fish meal, butter, eggs, black and garbanzo bean flour, wheat flour, vegetable juice, fruit puree and sucrose.
The diets had the same number of calories. At the end of the 30 months, they analyzed the gut microbiome – the good and bad bacteria that live in the gastrointestinal tract – in both diet groups through fecal samples. They found the gut bacteria diversity in the Mediterranean diet group was significantly higher than in the group that ate the Western diet.
There are about 2 billion good and bad bacteria living in human, if the bacteria are not properly balanced, the general health will suffer. The good bacteria- Lactobacillus, most of which are probiotic, were significantly increased in the Mediterranean diet group.
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