Project 458557

Many Canadians are overweight or obese and have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and other metabolic diseases such as fatty liver disease. Sticking to a diet to prevent or reverse obesity and metabolic diseases is very hard. This is an urgent health problem since even small changes in blood factors that are altered by diet can increase the risk of early death. For example, increased blood glucose links many metabolic diseases together an increases risk of early sickness and death. Nutrition is a key factor in metabolic health. Food interacts with bacteria that live in our guts and this relationship is important in how food alters blood glucose and metabolic disease. Nearly all microbiome research tries to look at what goes wrong during disease using the names of bacteria in the gut. The hope so far has been to find or develop a new probiotic (i.e., live bacteria) or prebiotic (i.e., compound that alters many live bacteria). We have discovered that "postbiotics" can alter metabolic disease and blood glucose. Our approach is different from prebiotics (that are not specific) or a magic bullet probiotic bacterium, which have never worked for metabolic disease. Postbiotics are dead parts of bacteria or metabolites that come from living or dead groups of bacteria. Many bacteria have evolved to avoid us and live despite our immune system. This allowed us to find very specific beneficial parts of bacteria. These bacterial parts are postbiotics and we know that they improve key aspects of metabolic disease. We now have candidate postbiotics that are beneficial, but do not need to be alive to improve blood glucose and metabolic disease during poor nutrition. Probiotic and prebiotics need to fight with the bacteria that is already in the gut, but our postbiotics overcome this limitation. We will now test and figure out how new postbiotics work during different diets so that we can develop better ways to support nutritional approaches to metabolic disease.