Why High Protein Diet (HPD) can contribute to weight loss

High-protein and calorie-restriction diets have shown clinical efficacy for obesity. It’s all because of the intestinal microbiome, a super small but vitally important ecosystem in your gut, which is also a mediator of obesity.

Gut microbiome composition can be influenced, even changed, by diets. Long-term dietary patterns are correlated with microbiome composition and interventional diets can rapidly change microbial composition. These findings raise the possibility that the microbiome is involved in the response to weight loss diets.

Preclinical data supports that high protein diet (HPD) has an effect on gut microbiome of obesity, but there are few studies taking place out of the laboratory and towards actual human beings.

Since the high protein diet’s mechanisms of managing obesity are not fully known, Nutrasumma took its chance for providing more detailed research.

Nutrasumma Fermented Pea Protein aiding in nutrition and weight loss

In 2020, researchers at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and the Veterans Administration Healthcare Division in Los Angeles conducted an experiment regarding Nutrasumma's Fermented Pea Protein on how it aids in nutrition and weight loss.

Our study has several key advantages compared to prior studies. It included a larger number of subjects, greater racial/ethnic diversity, frequent fecal sampling during longitudinal follow-up (six samples over 8 weeks), and high-depth sequencing with NovaSeq to allow for detection of rare taxa.

In summary, we provide evidence that high protein diet (HPD) modulates intestinal microbiome composition in obesity. This supports the hypothesis that changes in gut microbiome influence the outcomes of high protein dietary (HPD) interventions.

Additional studies with larger cohort size and longer duration are required to determine to what extent longitudinal changes in the microbiome. Incorporation of metagenomics and metabolomics to provide functional microbiome data may provide insight into mechanistic pathways that could undergo further study in preclinical models.

Additional future directions could include a comparison of different protein sources and/or HPDs of varying protein content. Further understanding of the link between the microbiome and the beneficial effects of a high protein diet may spur development of therapies for obesity that directly target the microbiome to complement dietary modification.

Nutrasumma Fermented Pea Protein Aiding in Weight Loss: Limitations

Like all academic studies, Nutrasumma’s research collaborating with UCLA has limitations.

The use of dietary counseling rather than meal replacement introduces additional variation into the study due to incomplete adherence and heterogeneity of patient dietary choices.

The cohort was male-predominant, so the results may not be applicable to females. In addition, while the study was larger than prior ones, it did not have enough subjects to be powered to detect a difference in clinical outcomes such as weight loss.

Finally, the microbiome analysis was based on 16S rRNA sequencing, which provides data on microbial composition but not on microbial gene content or function.

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