News & Views

Can dietary fiber replace fecal transplants?

Nature magazine (a high profile prestigious scientific journal) recently published a paper showing that dietary fiber was more effective than fecal transplant at improving gut microbe populations messed up by antibiotics1 .

The study was done with mice, so it may not translate to humans, but it supports what we have been saying about the dynamic nature of gut microbe populations. Microbes do not “colonize” the gut like previously assumed, but rather, they survive and grow based on what nutrients there are for them in our guts. That is – what we eat.

References

1 Diet outperforms microbial transplant to drive microbiome recovery in mice, Kennedy et al. Nature, 2025