Apples, Inducers of Eubiosis Driven Weight Management

Apples; great for SCFA production, restoring bacterial eubiosis in a disrupted gut and likely able to assist with weight management, say scientists in the journal Food Chemistry.[1] Apples, in general, have shown to protect against human chronic diseases due to their content of fibre and phenolic compounds. These bioactive compounds have low availability and can potentially reach to colon, modulate the balance of bacterial populations in the gut, and influence the host physiology. The apple health benefits are, in part, due to the interaction of fibre and phenolics with gut microbiota that results in changes in phenolic bioavailability and activity, and the production of short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) after fibre fermentation.

In this paper Granny Smith apples were identified as a cultivar with enhanced content of bioactive compounds including dietary fibre, extractable and non-extractable phenolics; these compounds can potentially reach the colon. After faecal fermentation of Granny Smith non-digestible compounds, they demonstrated that relative abundances of bacterial populations in faeces from obese mice tended to be similar to the lean controls. These results suggest that dietary fibre and phenolic compounds remaining in apple after digestion might help to prevent metabolic disorders driven by an altered microbiota in obesity, and potentially protect from an obesity-disturbed balance of microbiota.

Comment

The discovery could help prevent some of the disorders associated with obesity such as low-grade, chronic inflammation that can lead to diabetes. The balance of bacterial communities in the colon of obese people is disturbed. This results in microbial byproducts that lead to inflammation and influence metabolic disorders associated with obesity.

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