The Effect of Dietary Diversity on the Stability of the Gut Microbiome and their Methods of Measurement

The stability of the gut microbiome is thought to help provide immunity against diseases, serving as protection against disturbances to the microbiome. This thesis reviews the health benefits of a stable gut microbiome and explores the effect of diet in its stabilization. By organizing dietary items within a food tree, diet diversity is understood similarly to how microbiome diversity is measured. Hypothesized to see an increase in microbiome stability with an increase in diet diversity, several measurements of diversity are calculated and compared. Using the diet data from a vitamin D intervention pilot study, diet diversity, measured as the median Aitchison’s distance between consecutive days, is seen to negatively correlate with microbiome stability, as measured by the median of the inversed Aitchison’s distances between consecutive time points. This data indicates that within subjects taking vitamin D supplements, a more diverse diet is related to a less stable microbiome.