Impact of Diet on Human Intestinal Microbiota and Health

Our intestinal microbiota is involved in the breakdown and bioconversion of dietary and host components that are not degraded and taken up by our own digestive system. The end products generated by our microbiota fuel our enterocytes and support growth but also have signaling functions that generate systemic immune and metabolic responses. Due to the immense metabolic capacity of the intestinal microbiota and its relatively high plasticity, there is great interest in identifying dietary approaches that allow intentional and predictable modulation of the microbiota. In this article, we review the current insights on dietary influence on the human intestinal microbiota based on recent high-throughput molecular studies and interconnections with health. We focus especially on the emerging data that identify the amount and type of dietary fat as significant modulators of the colonic microbiota and its metabolic output.