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Comment by gww | Hacker News Reader

I am not a microbiome expert but I have always wondered how dynamic is the gut microbiome? For example, maybe I travel for a week and consume a bunch of fast food and drink a bunch of alcohol or I contracted food poisoning. Would my gut microbiome be substantially different than if I followed my regular diet of relatively healthy home made foods? and how long would it take to go back to its default state before I travelled (if ever).

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I've been told (by someone who has had C. diff and dealt with a number of gastro issues) that it can take up to 7 years for your gut to stabilize after simply taking antibiotics.

With that being said, some googling just now to make sure I'm not just spouting nonsense hasn't turned up a 7 year figure. But it has returned a bunch of articles pointing to studies that suggest it takes a long time. [1] says after 10 months there's still a disturbance.

[1] https://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/medication/long-do...

I have seen fairly convincing evidence presented quite recently that for the vast majority of people it may take months but after that period the intestinal microbiome is nearly indistinguishable from how it was before administering antibiotics.

I recall reading some news recently about studies of the microbiome in immigrants that suggest it can be a relatively quick shift. e.g. see: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/how-immig...

There was an interesting post on Reddit recently by someone who tracked their gut microbiome composition over a three-year period, with some nice graphs [1] and source code.

  The data were compiled with uBiome SmartGut and Explorer
  kits over a 3 year period. I directly parsed the .json
  files they provided. The plots were generated with 
  matplotlib and the source code is available here: 
  https://github.com/isaacgerg/ubiome_longitudinal_analysis

Not sure how scientific this is, but it was interesting to me that someone would even do this.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/bnrkqm/oc_...

It isn't scientific because there is no hypothesis, but it is certainly good quality data.

As you can see on charts like [1], it's really quite dynamic. You can tell when major life events occur from a plot of gut bacteria over time.

[1]: https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/2016/09/1001...

Different bacteria thrive on different nutrients, so changing your nutrient intake will affect their populations. I wouldn't expect a week of fast food to be significant compared to going on a ketogenic diet (starving all carbohydrate eating bacteria). Also, intake of new bacteria affects them, as it changes the competitive landscape.

Taking antibiotics massively reduces the quantity of gut bacteria. It often radically changes the balance as their numbers recover, resulting in a proportional increase in resistant strains.

Wonder what is the impact for those who just take Soylent for their meals. Does the lack of variety of nutrients kill of some bacteria in the gut and are they worse off for it?

I'm not sure it's correct to say Soylent constitutes a lack of variety of nutrients. Soylent and similar products contain a balance of macronutrients (carbohydrate, lipids, amino acids), vitamins and minerals.

Eating a ketogenic (almost no carbs) or fruitarian (almost entirely carbs) diet, is much more likely to create an imbalance in types of gut flora.

Yes. There's a long list of different starches and other molecules (e.g. connective tissue in joints) that your gut bacteria feed off of, and different strains of bacteria prefer different types of food. In the FODMAP diet, you avoid certain starches in a deliberate attempt to shift your biome diversity.

https://github.com/MaximilianKohler/HumanMicrobiome/wiki

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