Modern medicine can shift the gut microbiome within months

A few routine medical visits were enough to measurably “urbanize” gut microbes. In Elsevier's Cell Reports by Cell Press, researchers tracked remote Amazonian Indigenous communities and found their gut microbiota began shifting toward patterns more typical of industrialized populations after only limited medical contact, even without major diet or lifestyle change.

A rare natural experiment made the signal clearer than usual. Because these communities’ daily lives remained largely traditional, the start of quarterly World Health Organization-supported visits for river blindness prevention created a cleaner before/after comparison than most urbanization studies, where many factors change at once.

Diversity dropped quickly, and fiber-associated taxa declined. Over four months, gut microbial diversity fell and Prevotella and Treponema (often linked to fiber digestion) decreased, while groups more common in industrialized cohorts, including Bacteroidota and Verrucomicrobia, increased.

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