Sex, food, and the gut microbiota: Disparate response to caloric restriction diet with fibre supplementation in women and men

Scope: Dietary-based strategies are regularly explored in controlled clinical trials to provide cost-effective therapies to tackle obesity and its comorbidities. We present a complementary analysis based on a multivariate multi-omics approach of a caloric restriction intervention with fibre supplementation to unveil synergic effects on body weight control, lipid metabolism, and gut microbiota.

Methods and results: We explored faecal BAs and SCFAs, plasma BAs, and faecal shotgun metagenomics on 80 overweight participants of a 12-week caloric restriction clinical trial (-500 kcal/day) randomly allocated into fibre (10 g/day inulin + 10 g/day resistant maltodextrin) or placebo (maltodextrin) supplementation groups. The multi-omic data integration analysis (sparse PLS-DA method) uncovered the benefits of the fibre supplementation and/or the CRD (e.g., increase of Parabacteroides distasonis and faecal propionate), showing sex-specific effects on either adiposity and fasting insulin; effects thought to be linked to changes of specific gut microbiota species, functional genes, and bacterially produced metabolites like SCFAs and secondary BAs.

Conclusions: Our study has identified diet-microbe-host interactions helping to design personalised interventions. It also suggests that sex perspective should be considered routinely in future studies on dietary interventions efficacy. All in all, we uncovered that our dietary intervention was more beneficial for women than men. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.