Anissa ArmetUniversity of Alberta researchers, including postdoctoral fellow Anissa Armet and Jens Walter, have designed and published a cookbook, The NiMe Diet: Scientific Principles and Recipes, to guide Canadians towards a non-industrialized diet. The international study investigated how cardiometabolic benefits of this diet are linked to improved gut health.
Walter, who was Armet’s PhD supervisor during her time in graduate school, conducted research in Papua New Guinea, where he found that “non-industrialized populations have a very different gut microbiome than what is typically found in industrialized countries,” according to Armet.
These individuals’ diet consists primarily of “vegetables, fruits, some whole grains, legumes, no processed foods, and very small portions of animal proteins,” Armet explained.
This led to the creation of the Non-Industrialized Microbiome Restore (NiMe™) diet, based on the “hunter-gatherer” style diet of the Indigenous population in Papua New Guinea.
U of A researchers develop cookbook for a non-industrialized diet
Creating the recipes and eventually the cookbook was difficult, mainly because it was challenging to create recipes that are as “minimally processed as possible [and] palatable without oil or spices,” Armet said.
The diet is “rich in dietary fibre” and designed in a way that “would still be enjoyable.”
Armet and her co-researchers had to develop the recipes so they would still meet the “caloric and other energy requirements” of Canadians.
Limosilactobacillus reuteri, or L. reuteri for short, is a gut microbe that the researchers think has “been lost due to industrialization,” according to Armet.
Walter’s research showed that all individuals in the rural Papua New Guinea Indigenous population had L. reuteri in their gut to some extent,” whereas when Walter conducted the same test in the United States, “none of the American participants had L. reuteri.”
Their goal was to re-establish L. reuteri in the industrialized guts of American and Canadian participants. Armet explained that “lots of other studies have shown that L. reuteri has beneficial effects on modulating the immune system,” and it is often used as a “probiotic supplement.”
They hypothesized that “reintroducing L. reuteri would be associated with health benefits that have been shown in previous research.”
This microbe was chosen because it is “generally recognized as safe,” Armet said.
The safety of reintroducing other bacteria found in the non-industrialized gut has not been confirmed. Armet and her team chose to begin by reintroducing L. reuteri to test out their hypothesis and expand on previous research. Despite their efforts, recolonization was only successful in one individual, without clear reasoning as to why.
“It is hard to tell with just one person as a sample size,” Armet explained. “It did not recolonize, and it had no other effects on the gut. It was really just the NiMe™ diet that had all of the effects.”
NiMe™ diet can support chronic disease prevention, Armet says
The NiMe™ diet “showed very promising results” as “following the diet for only three weeks in participants that did not have any chronic diseases resulted in dramatic cardiometabolic health benefits,” Armet said.
The researchers weren’t expecting such drastic cardiometabolic improvements. Their “primary objective of the study was to re-establish L. reuteri. It was almost an afterthought to measure [cardiometabolic functioning],” Armet said.
She explained that the diet could contribute to public health initiatives and combat rising chronic diseases globally by guiding “dietary guidelines or recommendations that we need to really focus on providing support for individuals to try and follow this type of diet.”
The NiMe™ diet is “best suited for chronic disease prevention” and the specific diet one follows “really does depend on what your individual health needs are,” Armet said.
Barriers to this type of diet could hinder the potential outreach and positive effects of their work, according to Armet.
“We recognize that maybe not even so much the taste, but the access to these foods in terms of cost and people being able to make these foods for themselves” are potential challenges, Armet said.
In order to make this knowledge and the recipes as accessible as possible, they have made “the recipes from the study freely available in as many formats as possible,” according to Armet. This included publishing the book on social media.
They decided to “incorporate some of the scientific principles behind the diet, as well as the recipes in the open access book,” Armet said.
