Conducting research on diet-microbiome interactions: A review of current challenges, essential methodological principles, and recommendations for best practice in study design.

Diet is one of the strongest modulators of the gut microbiome. However, the complexity of the interactions between diet and the microbial community emphasises the need for a robust study design and continued methodological development. This review aims to summarise considerations for conducting high-quality diet-microbiome research, outline key challenges unique to the field, and provide advice for addressing these in a practical manner useful to dietitians, microbiologists, gastroenterologists and other diet-microbiome researchers. Searches of databases and references from relevant articles were conducted using the primary search terms 'diet', 'diet intervention', 'dietary analysis', 'microbiome' and 'microbiota', alone or in combination. Publications were considered relevant if they addressed methods for diet and/or microbiome research, or were a human study relevant to diet-microbiome interactions. Best-practice design in diet-microbiome research requires appropriate consideration of the study population and careful choice of trial design and data collection methodology. Ongoing challenges include the collection of dietary data that accurately reflects intake at a timescale relevant to microbial community structure and metabolism, measurement of nutrients in foods pertinent to microbes, improving ability to measure and understand microbial metabolic and functional properties, adequately powering studies, and the considered analysis of multivariate compositional datasets. Collaboration across the disciplines of nutrition science and microbiology is crucial for high-quality diet-microbiome research. Improvements in our understanding of the interaction between nutrient intake and microbial metabolism, as well as continued methodological innovation, will facilitate development of effective evidence-based personalised dietary treatments.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Journal of human nutrition and dietetics (Print)

• Publication date

  2021-02-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/jhn.12868PMID 33639033
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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