Coffee consumption is associated with the abundance of the gut bacterium Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus, suggesting that specific foods can affect the intestinal microbiome.
METHODOLOGY:
- The researchers selected coffee as a model to investigate the interplay between specific foods and the intestinal microbial community.
- They conducted a multicohort, multiomic analysis of US and UK populations with detailed dietary information from 22,867 participants, which they then integrated with public data from 211 cohorts comprising 54,198 participants.
- They conducted various in vitro experiments to expand and validate their findings, including adding coffee to media containing the L asaccharolyticus species that had been isolated from human feces.
TAKEAWAY:
- L asaccharolyticus is highly prevalent, with about fourfold higher average abundance in coffee drinkers, and its growth is stimulated in vitro by coffee supplementation.
- The link between coffee consumption and the microbiome was highly reproducible across different populations (area under the curve, 0.89), driven largely by the presence and abundance of L asaccharolyticus.
- Similar associations were found in analyses of data from 25 countries. The prevalence of the bacterium was high in European countries with high per capita coffee consumption, such as Luxembourg, Denmark, and Sweden, and very low in countries with low per capita coffee consumption, such as China, Argentina, and India.
