The Irish national rugby team might seem like a uniform study population, but it turns out their gut landscapes are highly diverse territories. That's according to a new study published in BMJ's Gut. Scientists from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at University College Cork and Teagasc Food Research Centre, Moorepark, in conjunction with the Irish Rugby Football Union studied forty male professional rugby players with a mean age of 29 in training leading up to the last Rugby World Cup and two male control groups. The researchers found that the rugby players, whose exercise and dietary habits tended to be more extreme than those of the Irish general public, also had gut microbiota that were more diverse.
From a release:
The athletes are an exceptional group in terms of their dietary intake, fitness/endurance and now we know, in relation to their gut microbiota! This high diversity is particularly linked with exercise and protein consumption and suggests that eating specific proteins and/or exercise can provide a means of increasing microbial diversity in the gut.
This is the first report that exercise increases microbial diversity in humans. While we and others have previously shown that diet influences microbial diversity, we can now report that protein consumption, in particular, positively correlates with microbial diversity.
According to the study, "The results provide evidence for a beneficial impact of exercise on gut microbiota diversity but also indicate that the relationship is complex and is related to accompanying dietary extremes."
Previously: Stanford team awarded NIH Human Microbiome Project grant, How exercise may affect gut hormones, weight loss and Researchers manipulate microbes in gut
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