Your gut health needs consistency - not just healthy food

Your gut microbiome doesn’t just care about what you eat – it cares about how often you eat it.

Most of us know we should eat more fruits and vegetables, cut back on junk food, and stay hydrated. That’s basic nutrition. But a new study is shaking up that familiar advice.

It turns out that even the healthiest foods won’t help much if you don’t eat them consistently.

Food consistency for gut health

Your gut microbiome – the tiny microbes living in your digestive system – care a lot about consistency. And if you’re only eating healthy food once in a while, you may not be doing your gut any favors.

This is the first time researchers have been able to prove how important regularity is when it comes to diet and gut health.

The study was conducted by a team at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and their collaborators at the University of California, San Diego.

Why your gut microbiome matters

Your gut microbiome is like a bustling neighborhood of bacteria, viruses, and fungi living inside your digestive system. Some of them help break down food, fight off bad germs, and even support your immune system. Others are not so helpful.

Scientists already knew that eating lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and nuts could lead to a more diverse and healthier gut microbiome. That’s been shown in dozens of past studies.

But this new research has revealed that it’s not enough to eat well once in a while.

Irregular consumption of healthy foods

Professor Marcel Salathé is head of the Digital Epidemiology Lab and co-director of the EPFL AI Center.

“This research clearly shows that you cannot binge on vegetables on your healthy day and then eat in an unhealthy way for the rest of the week or month,” said Professor Salathé.

“In fact, our study suggests that irregular consumption of healthy foods undoes many of the beneficial effects on the gut microbiota. This is a real incentive for future studies to not just look at what people are eating but the patterns of what they are eating over time.”

In other words, your gut likes routine. Feeding it broccoli only once a week doesn’t make up for six days of fast food and soda.

Challenge of understanding diets

In a surprising part of the study, the researchers found that your gut microbiome can reveal a lot about what you’ve been eating – and vice versa. With just a stool sample, they could predict a person’s diet with up to 85% accuracy using AI.

“For our collaborators in San Diego, who are some of the world’s leading experts in gut microbiome research, this was exciting,” said Professor Salathé.

“Getting such data from a stool sample is relatively easy, but understanding someone’s diet is notoriously difficult, it’s data that’s been challenging to collect.”

It’s hard to track what people eat over days, weeks, or months. Most past studies relied on people trying to remember what they ate, which isn’t always accurate. This research took a different route.

Tracking meals in real time

The key was a tool called the MyFoodRepo app. About 1,000 people joined a study called “Food & You” and used the app to log their meals.

Instead of filling out long forms, they just snapped a photo or scanned a barcode every time they ate. The app’s AI then analyzed the meal, and human reviewers double-checked the results.

“Historically, nutrition research has relied on food frequency questionnaires and 24-hour dietary recalls,” explained Rohan Singh, a doctoral assistant in the Digital Epidemiology Lab and lead author of the paper.

“In theory, you could ask somebody to write down everything they eat but in practice it’s just not done because it’s borderline impossible. Now, the AI is so good that we can do this data collection at a large scale,” he added.

Eating healthy foods regularly

The app gave a clear picture not only of what people were eating, but how regularly they ate well. And that’s what made the big difference in gut health.

“Our study has been particularly interesting because when you look at lifestyle-oriented gastrointestinal disorders, they often develop gradually,” said Singh.

“Since nutrition is one of the big contributors to these diseases, analyses like ours may be able to assess what can be improved in a person’s diet. AI can then help nudge people to adjust their food intake accordingly.”

Rethinking advice about diet

Most dietary guidelines focus on amounts: eat five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, cut back on sugar, limit processed food. But this study suggests those guidelines may need an update.

The researchers believe that regular eating habits – not just eating healthy in general – should become part of public health advice. They’re now using MyFoodRepo for other projects, including looking at how nutrition might affect memory and brain function.

They’re also studying food additives, like emulsifiers often found in packaged snacks, and how they may impact the microbiome.

The future of gut microbiome science

“There’s a strong hypothesis that some of these additives really may negatively impact your microbiota, and we have some early indications that this could indeed be the case. We’re still in the analysis stage but we are quite excited about early results,” said Professor Salathé.

The team is glad to see the app being used in other research labs around the world, helping to answer new questions about diet and health.

“From the outset, we knew we needed something extremely consumer-friendly and easy to use, while still providing the data that we needed,” said Professor Salathé.

“We built it to serve our own research needs, but also in a way which others would find useful – and it’s now being used in many other nutrition studies globally.”

The full study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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