Rhonda Patrick on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1054
“there's been studies showing that like 75% of the microbiome population changes and like, when you don't get at all any fiber”
What the evidence says
No published study reporting a specific '75%' figure for gut microbiome population change under fiber deprivation could be located in PubMed or Europe PMC searches. The best-known research on this mechanism is a 2016 Cell study (Desai et al.) using gnotobiotic mice colonized with a synthetic human gut microbiota, which found that fiber-deprived gut bacteria shift to consuming host mucus, eroding the protective colonic mucus layer and increasing pathogen susceptibility; it did not report a '75%' population-change statistic. Harvard's Nutrition Source similarly describes the general mechanism, that low-fiber diets reduce beneficial microbiota and favor pathogenic bacteria, without quantifying the change as 75%. The underlying mechanism Patrick describes is consistent with the literature, but the specific 75% figure appears to be an imprecise recollection rather than a documented finding.