PhD defence: Personalized Nutrition & Gut Microbiota Biomarkers in Weight Management

Lars H. Christensen

PhD thesis

Personalized nutrition has become a popular area of research aiming at individualizing diets to personal traits. The idea is to stratify study participants based on biomarkers such as host genes and gut microbiota, which is believed to explain some of the large variations in metabolic parameters seen among participants following dietary interventions.

In weight management, the gut microbiota biomarkers, enterotypes, have during recent years been associated with both changes in blood glucose and body weight. In this PhD thesis, I further support that enterotypes link to weight regulation among participants with overweight, when consuming whole grain diets and specific fibers of whole grains.

Furthermore, I find that a specific Bacteroides species predicts weight change with better precision than the proxy of enterotypes, Prevotella-to-Bacteroides ratio. Also, I endorse the notion that a person’s ability to digest starch in the upper gastrointestinal tract mediates the enterotype-body weight connection.

Accordingly, only among subjects with a low salivary amylase gene (AMY1) copy number, I find the association between the Prevotella enterotype and weight loss to hold true. These findings indicate that only a subgroup of individuals will experience weight loss success depending on their microbiota composition and genes related to carbohydrate digestion, when consuming diets enriched with whole grain fibers.

In summary, enterotypes are promising biomarkers in weight management, and in combination with species-level microbiota information, microbial metabolites, and host genes, these seem to have a great potential in precision nutrition management of obesity.

Download Publications; Summary; Summary in Danish; Table of content.

2021, 134 pages.

Time

9 June 2021, 14:00

Place

Digital defence.

Opponents 

Professor Lars Ove Dragsted (chair), Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Professor Rikard Landberg, PhD, Division of Food and Nutrition Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

Professor Knud Erik Bach Knudsen, PhD, Department of Animal Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Main supervisor

Associate Professor Mads F. Hjorth, PhD, Department of Nutrition, Exercise, and Sports, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Co-supervisor

Assistant Professor Henrik M. Roager, PhD, Department of Nutrition, Exercise, and Sports, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Project Director, Arne Astrup, MD, PhD, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Denmark.

The thesis is available for inspection at the library, Nørre Allé 51, DK-2200 Copenhagen N.