Nature: Mice eating a low-fibre diet have a higher risk of bowel infection, thanks to bacteria that normally live in the gut. Eric
Martens at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor and
Mahesh Desai, now at the Luxembourg Institute of Health, together with
their colleagues, compared the effects of fibre-poor and fibre-rich
diets in mice that lacked their own bacteria and were given a mix of 14
species of human gut bacteria. These microbes normally consume
carbohydrates from dietary fibre, but without these nutrients, the
bacteria instead degraded the mucus barrier that lines the intestinal
wall.
Thinning of this protective layer (
pictured as
indicated by white arrows in the right panel; left panel shows normal
layer) exposed the intestinal surface to attack by disease-causing
bacteria. More than half of the mice eating a low-fibre diet lost at
least 20
% of their body weight after infection with the pathogen
Citrobacter rodentium.
Cell 167, 1339–1353 (2016)
