I’m excited to share our new RCT published today (as pre-print) and presented at the Nutrition Society conference.
🦠 The BIOME study 🦠
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.02.24309816v1
❓Why did we do this?
There is an urgent need for simple dietary strategies aimed at improving health in the current failing food environment.
❓What did we do?
The BIOME study investigated the effect of a prebiotic wholefood blend (ZOE Daily30) vs a functional control vs a probiotic supplement on both chronic and postprandial health outcomes and microbiome composition in 399 healthy participants.
❓What did we find?
The prebiotic blend improved gut microbiome composition vs the control and probiotic, and also improved chronic measures of gut health, mood, energy and hunger as well as postprandial measures of mood and hunger.
❓So what?
Given that modifying dietary behaviour is challenging, particularly as a result of modern lifestyles in which people typically have less time to prepare fresh foods and lack nutritional education, this single dietary approach demonstrates the promise that small changes can make to start to reduce the growing burden of diet related ill-health.
❓What am I most proud of as the lead scientist on this study?
This was an exclusively remote RCT, incorporating a 6-week dietary intervention assessing multiple measures of health (gut microbiome, metabolomics and self-reported measures), with both high self-reported adherence and participant retention. This demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and a potential paradigm shift for dietary intervention trials, in that they can be conducted remotely while maintaining scientific rigour.