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posted by chromas on Thursday November 01 2018, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the have-some-more-chicken,-have-some-more-pie,-it-doesn't-matter-if-it's-boiled-or-fried dept.

The Atlantic reports:

Immigrants' gut bacteria "westernize" soon after they move to the U.S.

[...] In their new homeland-Minneapolis-they began to eat more protein, sugar, and fat. They indulged, like most Americans do, in processed food. Within a generation, the Hmong women went from having an obesity rate of 5 percent to one of more than 30 percent.

[...] The researchers compared the gut microbiota of Hmong and Karen women still living in Thailand with the gut microbiota of three groups: Hmong and Karen women who had immigrated to the U.S., these immigrants' American-born children, and white American controls. The researchers also followed one group of 19 Karen refugees from their time in Thailand through their move to the U.S., tracking the components of their microbiota during their first year in America. (They limited the study to women because substantially more Hmong women than men were immigrating to the U.S.)

After about nine months in the U.S., the researchers found, the immigrants' gut microbiomes had began to "westernize." The microbiomes became less diverse—teeming with fewer types of bacteria—which is often associated with obesity. "Having low diversity in your microbiome is almost universally a sign of bad health, across almost every disease that has been studied," says Dan Knights, a computational microbiologist at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Cell.

The study: US Immigration Westernizes the Human Gut Microbiome (DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.10.029)
Immigrant Microbiome Project


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