第 1篇-医学健康类（选自《大西洋月刊》 2016年 1月）
In the decades after World War II, a one-eyed Irish missionary-surgeon namedDenis Burkittmoved to Uganda, where he noted that the villagers there are far more fiberthan Westerners did. This didn’t just bulk up their stools, Burkitt reasoned; it alsoexplained their low rates of heartdisease, colon cancer, and other chronic illnesses.“America is a constipated nation,” he once said. “If you pass small stools, you have bighospitals.”
“Burkitt really nailed it,” says Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at StanfordUniversity. Sure, some of the man’s claims were far-fetched, but he was right about thevalue of fiber and the consequences of avoiding it. And Sonnenburg thinks he knows why:Fiber doesn’t just feed us—it also feeds the trillions of microbes in our guts.Fiber is a broad term that includes many kinds of plant carbohydrates that we cannotdigest.Our microbes can, though, and they break fiber into chemicals that nourish ourcells and reduce inflammation. But no single microbe can tackle every kind of fiber.
They specialize, just as every antelope in the African savannah munches on its ownfavored type of grass or shoot.①This means that a fiber-rich diet can nourish a wide
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