 If you test more than 1,000 patients suffering from irritable bowel type symptoms, such as excess gas, bloating, diarrhea, and abdominal pain for longer than six months, who don't appear to have anything more serious going on, such as inflammatory bowel disease, a significant percentage were found to be suffering from lactose intolerance, intolerance to the milk sugar lactose. In infancy we have an enzyme in our small intestines that digests milk sugar, but most of us understandably lose it after weaning. Although a genetic mutation has led to the persistence of the enzyme in a minority of adults, about 75% of the world's population malabsorb lactose and have lactose intolerance after age 30. A third, though, were diagnosed with SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. The evidence for SIBO and IBS symptoms is shrouded in controversy, predominantly because of the fact that the breath tests used in clinical practice to diagnose SIBO are not valid, as I explored in the last video. And it's not even clear what the implications are of having more versus less bacteria growing in your small intestine, since the number don't seem to correlate with symptoms. It turns out it's not the number, but the type. It's the kind of bugs you have growing in your small intestine. So it's small intestinal microbial dysbiosis, not overgrowth in general, but the wrong kind of growth that appears to underlie symptoms associated with functional gastrointestinal disorders like irritable bowel syndrome. How can you prevent this from happening? While the symptoms appear to be correlated to a significant drop in the number of prevetella species. Remember them? Prevetella are healthy fiber feeders, suggestive of a higher fiber intake in healthy individuals, while the bugs found more in symptomatic patients ate sugar, which may reflect a higher dietary intake of sugars. Yes, but correlation doesn't mean causation. To prove cause and effect, you have to put it to the test, which is exactly what they did. Switching a group of healthy individuals who habitually ate a higher fiber diet to a more typical standard American low fiber diet with lots of sugar produced striking results within just seven days. First, 80% developed new gastrointestinal symptoms out of the blue, such as bloating and abdominal pain that resolved on resumption of their more healthful, habitual, higher fiber diet. And the diet-related changes in the small intestinal microbiome were predictive of symptoms and linked to an alteration in intestinal permeability. In other words, they developed a leaky gut within seven days. While some went from sebo-positive to sebo-negative, or sebo-negative to sebo-positive, it didn't matter, since the number of bacteria growing didn't correlate with symptoms. It was the type of bacteria growing. And no wonder their guts got leaky, short chain fatty acid levels plummeted. Those are the magical by-parts that our good gut bugs make from fiber, which play an important role in intestinal barrier integrity, meaning keeping our gut from getting leaky. While we don't have sound data that's something like a low-fod-map diet has any benefit for sebo-symptom patients, there have been more than a dozen randomized controlled trials putting fiber to the test, and overall, there was a significant improvement in symptoms among those randomized to increase their fiber intake. That may actually help explain why high-fiber plant-based diets may prevent so many common diseases the effects such diets have on the composition and metabolic activity of our microbiome. Our good gut bugs take the plant residues like fiber and produce health-promoting and cancer-suppressing metabolites like those short chain fatty acids, which have profound anti-inflammatory properties. All the evidence points to a physiological need for about 50 grams of fiber a day, which is the amount contained in the traditional African diet and associated with the prevention of Westernized diseases. That's approximately twice what's typically recommended in three times more than what most people are getting day to day. Perhaps it should be no surprise we need so much. Even though we split from chimpanzees millions of years ago, there's still broad congruency in the composition of our respective microbiomes to this day. While they're still eating their 98 to 99% plant-based diets to feed their friendly flora with fiber, we've largely removed fiber-rich foods from our food supply.