Highlights:
Prevalence of Blastocystis in the gut microbiome varies across geography and lifestyle
Healthier plant-based diets are linked with higher gut Blastocystis carriage
Blastocystis-positive subjects tend to have healthier cardiometabolic profiles
Blastocystis presence increases after a diet-improving intervention program Diet impacts human health, influencing body adiposity and the risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases. The gut microbiome is a key player in the diet-health axis, but while its bacterial fraction is widely studied, the role of micro-eukaryotes, including Blastocystis, is underexplored. We performed a global-scale analysis on 56,989 metagenomes and showed that human Blastocystis exhibits distinct prevalence patterns linked to geography, lifestyle, and dietary habits. Blastocystis presence defined a specific bacterial signature and was positively associated with more favorable cardiometabolic profiles and negatively with obesity (p < 1e–16) and disorders linked to altered gut ecology (p < 1e–8). In a diet intervention study involving 1,124 individuals, improvements in dietary quality were linked to weight loss and increases in Blastocystis prevalence (p = 0.003) and abundance (p < 1e–7). Our findings suggest a potentially beneficial role for Blastocystis, which may help explain personalized host responses to diet and downstream disease etiopathogenesis.
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