What you ate in the past can shape the diversity of your gut flora, and affect how well your gut microbes respond to new foods. Christopher Intagliata reports.

你过去吃的东西塑造你肠道菌群的多样性，并影响你肠道微生物对新食物的反应。克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。

撰文/播音：克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔(Christopher Intagliata)

翻译：郭鑫鹏

审校：丁可含

You are what you eat, the old expression goes. But it leaves out crucial detail. “We don’t dine alone. We dine with trillions of friends.” Jeff Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in Saint Louis. “And they are partners in consuming these meals and ingredients.”

俗话说，人如其食。但是这句话缺失了关键细节。“我们并不是一个人进食，还有万亿朋友和我们一起。”圣路易华盛顿大学微生物学家杰夫·戈登说。“并且它们和我们一同消耗这些食物和原料。“

Those friends-they’re microbes in our guts. They break down dinner, including otherwise indigestible stuff, and pass the leftovers on to more microbes. Creating a complex food web inside us.

那些朋友，它们是我们肠道中的微生物。它们分解食物，还包括那些无法消化的部分，然后把剩余物传给其他更多的微生物。在我们体内建立了一个复杂的是食物网。

But that microbial garden is lot more diverse in people who eat a calorie-restricted, veggie-rich diet. The typical American diet on the other hand-breads, meat, cheese, not a lot of veggies-doesn’t raise up near as diverse a crop of microbes.

但是对于那些限制热量摄入、多吃蔬菜的人来说，他们体内的微生物更加丰富。而对于美国人典型饮食，包含面包、肉、奶酪，而没有太多蔬菜，便不会在体内出现那样大量的微生物。

And microbial diversity matters. Because in a mouse model, Gordon’s team found that, if you give up the American diet, in favor of a healthier one with lots of veggies-the “Americanized” gut bacteria, being less diverse, aren’t primed to respond. They’re not great at regrouping, to accommodate all the nutrients in kale and broccoli and so on.

而微生物多样性有很大影响。因为在一个小鼠模型中，戈登的团队发现了如果你放弃美国式饮食，以一个含有更多蔬菜、更健康的饮食取而代之，那么美国化肠道细菌会变少，而无法适应。它们并不精于重组，来吸收羽衣甘蓝、西兰花等食物中的营养物质。

The study is in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. [Nicholas W. Griffin et al., Prior Dietary Practices and Connections to a Human Gut Microbial Metacommunity Alter Responses to Diet Interventions.]

研究发表在期刊《细胞宿主和微生物》上。

All this isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to eat healthier. Because it’s not clear how this microbial efficiency translates into human health. Or to what extent you might be able to pick up beneficial microbes from those around you, as they demonstrated mice can, in this study. But Gordon’s colleague Nick Griffin had this prediction: “It’s entirely possible that in the future we’ll more and more recognize a need to reinstall absent populations of bacteria in people as they’re looking to change their diet for benefits to health.”

以上所述并不是说，你不应该去吃更健康的食物。因为现在还不清楚微生物效率如何作用于人体健康。或者你需要获取周围的有益微生物到什么程度，像他们在研究中的小鼠身上看到的。但是戈登的同事尼克·格里芬作出了以下预测：“肯定的是，未来我们会逐渐意识到重新获取那些人体缺失的微生物的重要性，因为他们的饮食会更注重健康。“

Until the-next time you’re about to fertilize your microbial flora with a patty melt-you might just wanna do a gut check first.

直到下次你再吃肉饼，来培养你的微生物群落时，你可能想要先做一个肠道检查。

-Christopher Intagliata