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Published on: July 31, 2019
Causal Effects of Yogurt Intake on Gut Microbiota: A European Mendelian Randomization Study
Mengqi Yang1, Liping Wang2, Peng Zhou2
1Department of General Surgery, The Affiliated Wuxi No. 2 People's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi, China.
Background:
Yogurt is reported to maintain the balance of gut microbiota and prevent disease, but the causal relationship remains unclear.
Methods:
We selected data from UK Biobank and MiBioGen to perform Mendelian randomization analysis. MR Egger, inverse variance weighted, and so forth were employed to assess the causality between yogurt intake, low-fat and full-fat yogurt, and 196 taxa of gut microbiota. Parallelly, low-fat and full-fat yogurt were integrated to perform multivariable Mendelian randomization. Then, we summarized preliminary results according to microbiotic taxonomy.
Results:
Statistics hinted at the implicit associations between yogurt intake and Haemophilus (OR = 2.08), Clostridium sensu stricto_1 (OR = 1.84), Peptostreptococcaceae (OR = 1.53), Betaproteobacteria (OR = 0.70), Bilophila (OR = 0.58), and Ruminococcaceae UCG-011 (OR = 0.40), along with the associations between low-fat yogurt and Eubacterium ruminantium (OR = 2.48), Methanobacteriaceae (OR = 3.06). The findings were causal and consistent, albeit with some false positive rates.
Conclusions:
Yogurt intake suggestively increased the abundance of Haemophilus, Clostridium sensu stricto_1, and Peptostreptococcaceae and decreased the abundance of Ruminococcaceae UCG-011, Betaproteobacteria and Bilophila; low-fat yogurt suggestively increased the abundance of Eubacterium ruminantium and Methanobacteriaceae.
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