And with each new meal or mouthful, we select for microbes that are best at digesting whatever we’ve just eaten. They react with incredible speed. One study asked ten volunteers to stick to two strict diets for five days each: one rich in fruit, vegetables, and grains, and the other heavy in meat, eggs, and cheese. As their diets changed, so did the recruits’ microbiomes – and quickly. Within a single day, they could flip between a carbohydrate-busting, plant-eating mode, and a protein-busting, meat-eating one.25 In fact, these two kinds of community looked a lot like the gut microbes of
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interesting. the switching between microbes
