According to the post Lancet Planet Health.
This article follows a growing body of research and highlights the critical role of food and nutrition in maintaining healthy gut microbial populations in humans, resulting in better metabolism and gut health.
Diversity destroys
According to the review, climate-induced changes in yield and nutritional quality of plants, seafood, meat and dairy products may undermine the diversity of this microorganism, allowing balance to balance microbial strains associated with malnutrition and specific diseases.
The review also warns that these regions will be more pronounced in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as these regions bear the brunt of climate stressors (including higher temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide), which can affect their agricultural output and increase under-realization in these regions.
The review shows that greater dependence on local food sources than other population groups and has been shown to have greater intestinal microbial diversity may also be more susceptible to climate-related changes.
Studies have found that high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can reduce the amount of plant micronutrients such as phosphorus, potassium, zinc and iron, as well as protein concentrations in important crops such as wheat, corn and rice. These effects increase the complexity of affecting the intestinal flora.
Although the impact of food and nutrition is direct, the review also examines the role of changes in water, soil and other environmental microbiota due to climate change.
A good balance
In another recent comment Health dialogueResearchers from the Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhi Nagar analyzed the effects of calories on human and animal health in India. They found that foodborne and water-infectious diseases and malnutrition increased with calories.
Although these findings reflect common knowledge about food and water-related diseases in warm weather, the effects on gut malnutrition (imbalance of gut microbial populations) also require consideration of future calorie-related relief efforts, The Lancet Comment said.
“Although we know and study the various effects of climate change on human health, one aspect is still being studied – the impact of climate change on human gut microbial communities.” The Lancet said a professor of aquatic ecology at MSU Foundation at Michigan State University. “This part can be explained by the fact that researchers studying human microbiomes do not necessarily consider it in climate change environments.”
The human intestine is about home 100 trillion Bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses. Bacteria are the main members of the group. The overall diversity of microorganisms in the gut affects several aspects of human well-being, including immunity, maintenance of glucose levels and metabolism.
according to 2018 Analysis exist BMJLow bacterial diversity has been observed in atopic eczema, type I and type II diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease, among others. Researchers are also exploring how intestinal malnutrition changes the central nervous system and leads to neurological diseases.
More research attention
The gut microbiome – the collective genome of microorganisms in the gut – has far more genes than the human genome, producing thousands of metabolites that affect individual health and development.
“Our understanding of the gut microbiota’s role in human health is still evolving,” While climate change is a growing concern in this context, establishing cause and effect is difficult as there are many confounding factors,” Sachit Anand, a paediatric urologist and assistant professor at AIIMS, New Delhi, said. In his research, Anand exams the role of gut microbiota in congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract.
He added that understanding the interactions between the microbiota, host and environment is attracting more research attention, especially when evaluating individuals’ sensitivity to specific diseases. He said that as climate change becomes a key influencing factor in this “triad”, its impact cannot be ignored.
It can be tempting to examine these interdependencies in a linear manner: IE is climate-induced crop changes that affect diet and therefore affect the gut microbiota, or climate-induced temperature rises make intestinal infections more prevalent, ultimately destroying the microorganisms of gastrointestinal microbes. However, Litchman and Tarini Shankar Ghosh, assistant professors at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, both warned that many of these stressors often occur simultaneously.
As a computing biologist, Ghosh is interested in patterns of data about the human gut microbiome.
“If you take the low-income groups in urban environments as an example, you are studying the effects of temperature, pollution, lack of quality food and water supply,” he explained. “There are multiple factors that destroy the gut flora at the same time.”
A new science
Gosh also said that in many disease states, finding malnutrition is a diagnosis. According to him, this means it is related to the balance of adverse microbial populations: malnutrition also indicates a loss of interdependence among the “normal” microbial strains, resulting in the loss of several metabolic functions in the host.
“What we need now is to generate more data to understand how so-called good bacteria interact and benefit the host. Data generation has to be in line with connecting this information with climate change, so we know what is happening,” Ghosh said.
As a result, a multidisciplinary approach with researchers from different fields is crucial to understanding the impact of climate change on the human gut microbiota, Leachman said. But, besides insufficient awareness of the impacts of climate change, few funding programs have been able to achieve such interdisciplinary and international research, a major obstacle to future research of this nature, she added.
On the other hand, with advances in computational biology and metagenomics – an analysis of the genetic makeup of microorganisms in a given environment – researchers are getting closer to unearthing some secrets of gut microbiota. For example, Professor Vineet Kumar Sharma, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, developed an open database called “Open Database”. gutbugbd. It provides information on how the gut microbiome interacts with specific nutrients and drugs and changes specific methods, paving the way for treatments to regulate gut microbiota in response to various changes.
“At the moment, we’re just doing a broader survey of the gut microbiota to understand what’s there and how they work. Even if we introduce a healthy microbiota through probiotics (probiotics), we can’t know if the response between two people is the same. Everyone’s gut microbiota is unique, and it’s important to understand that, and it’s important to know.”
Sharmila Vaidyanathan is an independent writer from Bangalore.
publishing – May 8, 2025 at 05:30 AM IST
