Food nutrition facts matter, but don't tell you much about gut microbes

nutritional content of our subjects' diets - the macro- and micronutrients like what is usually shown on a food label, such as fats, carbohydrates and sodium

It seems like every day a new study is published that links the bacteria in the gut to a specific disease or health condition. The allure of research like ours and that of other groups is that it might eventually be possible to give personalized recommendations for what specific foods to eat to shift your bacteria in a direction that improves your health.

To understand how individual foods change the bacteria that live inside the human gut, collectively known as the microbiome, we need to know the microscopic makeup of each food