Sickly Sweet

As the holiday season approaches, we might be looking forward to some comfort food, but recent research reminds us to go easy on the sweets. Already an obvious culprit for the high prevalence type II diabetes, evidence is mounting to suggest sugar-rich Western-style diets are also linked to gut disorders, particularly inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Tests in mice suggest one possible way sugar might cause trouble, by altering the community of microorganisms, or microbiome, inside the gut. Mice fed a sugar-rich diet possess higher levels of harmful gut bacteria, known to degrade the protective mucus layer lining the colon (pictured, with gut cell nuclei in blue, bacteria in red and mucus in green), and are also more susceptible to colitis, a form of IBD. Despite differences between the microbiome in humans and rodents, investigating links between diet, gut bacteria and IBD could reveal new insights into this increasingly common disorder.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Emmanuelle Briolat

Writer

A researcher specialising in visual signals in Lepidoptera, camouflage and the effects of light pollution, Emmanuelle’s writing covers a range of topics, from biomedical research to children’s books about moth defences.

Website

• Image from work by Shahanshah Khan and Sumyya Waliullah, and colleagues
• Department of Pathology, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
• Image copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the AAAS
• Published in Science Translational Medicine, May 2020