Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
We read with interest the study reported by Yi Wan and colleagues, who examined the relative effects of high-fat and low-fat diets on the gut microbiota and faecal metabolites, and their relationship with cardiometabolic risk factors.1 The authors should be congratulated for the remarkable achievement of performing a feeding study on 217 young adults for 6 months with impressive retention rate. They concluded that higher fat consumption was associated with unfavourable changes in gut microbiota, faecal metabolomic profiles and systemic inflammation, and implied that difference in dietary fat was causally related to the changes observed, as evidenced by the title of the paper. While the study has been beautifully performed, we believe that the results have been misinterpreted.
The authors have overlooked the importance of the associated alterations in non-digestible carbohydrates. The …