Eating a Rainbow Diet, a colorful Mediterranean Diet, can increase the good bacteria in your gut by 7%, when compared with the standard Western diet, according to scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. In particular the Rainbow Diet particularly increased strains of the species Lactobacillus, known to increase acidity in the gut and restrict pathogens. Other strains of this species, like L. rhamnosus, are known to heal the holes in leaky gut syndrome.
The study was led by Hariom Yadav, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular medicine and microbiology and immunology, who used animals rather than humans because the data was more accurate. Human studies tend to rely on self-administered diet records, and people are not thorough in these.
Researchers took non-human primates, which were randomized to either Western or Mediterranean diets. and followed for 30 months.
The Mediterranean diet consisted of fish oil, olive oil, fish meal, butter, eggs, black and garbanzo bean flour, wheat flour, vegetable juice, fruit puree and sucrose.
The Western diet consisted of lard, beef tallow, butter, eggs,
cholesterol, high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose.
The diets had the same number of calories. The benefits of the Mediterranean diet on stool analysis were clear. Levels of good bacteria (commensal bacteria) received a significant lift. And this first increases the strength of the immune response. Researchers said that the results had huge implications for the treatment of chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even brain diseases.
Chris Woollams, former Oxford University Biochemist and author of the best-selling book ‘The Rainbow Diet’ said, “You cannot separate diet from gut bacteria and vice versa. A poor diet increases levels of pathogens and reduces acidity in the gut; a good diet stimulates the good bacteria. The Rainbow Diet is not just about colourful vegetables and fruit but about types of fat, types of protein, types of biactive products and so on. There is more research on the Rainbow diet, good health, illness prevention and illness restriction than all the other diets (Paleo, ketogenic, Atkins, Gerson, Budwig etc.) put together. We have previously seen that fish oils reduce inflammatory gut bacteria as does olive oil, and these two have great synergistic benefits.”