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We know that fries, chips, burgers, and soda are junk food, to be eaten sparingly. And we know that stress is harmful to our bodies. A new study shows that stress can literally alter gut microbiota—the microbe population in the gastrointestinal tract—in much the same ways as a high-fat diet.

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The research was published in Nature Scientific Reports and was conducted by scientists at Brigham Young University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Laura Bridgewater, a professor of microbiology and molecular biology at BYU, and the associate dean of BYU College of Life Sciences led the team. They worked with rodents, exposing 8-week-old mice (deemed as mice adults in the science world) to a high-fat diet. Then, after 16 weeks, they were returned to a normal diet and exposed to mild stress. How do you mildly stress a mouse, by the way? Have them refinance a mouse mortgage? Spend holidays with the mouse in-laws? But I digress. The team judged how the gut microbiota was changing for the mice, by extracting microbial DNA from the mouse poop. Results: The male mice had exhibited more signs of anxiety while on the high-fat diet, but once it was stress only, it was the female mice that had their gut microbes shifting as if they were still on the high-fat diet.

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“Stress can be harmful in a lot of ways, but this research is novel in that it ties stress to female-specific changes in the gut microbiota,” wrote Bridgewater in the study. “We sometimes think of stress as a purely psychological phenomenon, but it causes distinct physical changes.”

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While the study was only conducted on mice, not humans, Bridgewater and her team feel there may be a takeaway for humans. “In society, women tend to have higher rates of depression and anxiety, which are linked to stress,” Bridgewater wrote. “This study suggests that a possible source of the gender discrepancy may be the different ways gut microbiota responds to stress in males vs. females.”

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by Kathryn Drury Wagner – Nov 2nd, 2017