SEMINAR: Diet manipulation of the gut microbiota - are there consequences?

The Seminar: Diet as a preventative tool or for health improvement is not new, but the effect of diet or diet components on the gut microbiota is still poorly understood. The understanding of such effects is becoming ever more important as the gut microbiota's effect on host health becomes more apparent. In this presentation I will give evidence to support diet as a tool to improve gut health in an AOM/DSS (inflammatory cancer model) rat model and for symptom relief in human IBS sufferers.

The Speaker: Dr Claus Christophersen received a Master of Science from the University of Copenhagen (2003) and a PhD from the University of Western Australia, Perth (2008). He then moved to Adelaide to undertake a Post-Doc position in the CSIRO Preventative Health Flagship before he became a research scientist in what is now called CSIRO Food & Nutrition. In September 2015 Dr Christophersen left CSIRO to take up a position as Lecturer in the School of Exercise and Health Sciences at Edith Cowan University. Dr Christophersen's research interest are in understanding the interactions between the gut microbiome, diet and the host response, and in developing molecular and biochemical markers of a healthy gut. To accomplish this he utilizes in vitro and animal models and human intervention studies, and an integration of bacterial 16S rRNA sequencing, biochemical and physiological data using multivariate statistical analysis. Currently he is applying this strategy and his understanding of the biological system to establish the impact of diet or diet components on the gut microbiome and host response. The challenge is to modify the diet composition to change the structure of the microbiome that will lead to an altered fermentation output that ultimately affects the host response. Dr Christophersen has published in many different areas of gut research, i.e. obesity, damaging effect of high protein diet, ulcerative colitis (UC), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Gut-Brain Axis (Autism), healthy athletes and other healthy cohorts. For all these research areas a common theme is diet manipulation, either as a whole diet or a diet component. Resistant starch (RS) has played a key role in many of these studies showing the beneficial effects of RS on gut health. Through these studies Dr Christophersen has an indepth knowledge of the microbial changes and the resulting changes in microbial fermentation following RS supplementation. This knowledge has been applied in many studies to rectify gut microbiome dysbiosis. In a study published in GUT he was part of a team that observed abnormal fermentation of fibre in a subset of UC of patients. Dr Christophersen was also part of the team who published (GUT) the first comprehensive study showing a low FODMAP diet changes the luminal gut microbiota in IBS patients and this can have long-term consequences for colonic health.