06/06/2026
One of my highlights from Day 2 of the IHMC Congress in Seoul was a lecture by Professor Ruth Ley (Max Planck Institute for Biology; Germany). Her session covered a few topic areas, but the one most important to me fit into one of the key themes that ran through the congress - the Western diet and lifestyle drives changes in not just the composition of the microbiome, but it's behaviours. You may (or may not) know that Eubacterium and Roseburia are key butyrate-producing genera found in the colon. They also have flagella (little hair-like tails), which means they can "swim" up and down the gut lumen looking for food. Usually, the immune system gets triggered by flagella found on bacteria, such as in the case of Salmonella. But for these beneficial commensals, the immune system just ignores them. This changes, however, once exposed to low fibre dietary patterns, dietary emulsifiers, and processed foods, which cause these two genera to grow more flagella, and longer flagella. Unlike their typical flagella, these new ones drive inflammation (via increases in IL-6). Just another illustration of how the typical Western diet drives negative shifts in microbiome functionality, which then drives increases in body-wide inflammation. Just how your body experiences the increase in inflammation will be individual, but gut-microbiome-derived inflammation can contribute to autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases. So, we now have another reason to eat more plant fibres and avoid processed foods and drinks.
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- Dr Hawrelak & Dawn Whitten
