Dietary Consistency and Quality Associated with Gut Microbiota Diversity
The gut microbiota is profoundly influenced by dietary choices, with emerging evidence linking it to various health outcomes. Using detailed temporal nutrition data captured through real-time food logging via a smartphone app in the "Food & You" digital cohort of ~1,000 participants, we investigate diet-microbiota associations. Our analysis reaffirms that high-quality diets rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts, micronutrients, and favorable dietary indices like HEI correlate with increased microbial diversity and improved stool quality, while fast food-rich diets show opposite effects. Regular consumption of beneficial food groups emerges as a key factor, with dietary consistency sometimes showing stronger associations than average intake quantities. Machine learning analyses reveal strong bidirectional predictability between gut microbiota composition and dietary factors (ROC AUC up to ~0.85-0.9). These findings highlight the critical role of both diet quality and consistency in shaping gut microbiota, the importance of temporal nutrition in offering insights for targeted nutritional strategies, and suggest that the gut microbiota can be used to estimate dietary indices.