{"id":424073,"date":"2026-04-29T21:42:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T21:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/424073\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T21:42:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T21:42:07","slug":"modern-lifestyles-affect-how-gut-bacteria-process-estrogen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/424073\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern lifestyles affect how gut bacteria process estrogen"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A new study provides evidence that industrialized lifestyles are changing how people regulate estrogen and other hormones through the gut microbiome\u2014the ecosystem of microbes inside the digestive system.<\/p>\n

The gut microbiome\u00ad has an important role in regulating estrogen, a hormone that affects many aspects of human health, including fertility, growth and development, and susceptibility to hormone-related conditions, such as breast and ovarian cancer.<\/p>\n

According to the new study, the gut microbiomes of people in industrialized societies have up to seven times greater capacity to recycle discarded estrogen into the bloodstream than those of individuals in non-industrial populations.<\/p>\n

The findings also showed that formula-fed infants have two-to-three times the capacity to recycle estrogen than breastfed babies, which suggests that the divergence in how gut microbiomes process estrogen begins early in life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is really striking that industrialized lifestyles and early life infant feeding choices may be unintentionally influencing our hormone levels through the gut microbiome,\u201d says lead author Rebecca Brittain, a former postdoctoral research fellow in Yale University\u2019s anthropology department and at the Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur daily environments, diets, and habits in industrialized society appear to affect the levels of gut microbes that regulate hormones.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next step is to pinpoint the specific factors driving these differences and understand how the body responds to this hormone recycling,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>. It was coauthored by Richard Bribiescas, a professor of anthropology at Yale, and Grazyna Jasienska, professor of health sciences at the Jagiellonian University Medical College.<\/p>\n

For the study, the researchers analyzed three publicly available gut-microbiome datasets that, combined, cover 24 populations across four continents, including hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in Botswana, Tanzania, and Nepal, rural farmers in Malawi and Venezuela, and urbanites in Philadelphia and St. Louis. One of the datasets includes information on the gut microbiomes of breastfed and formula-fed infants.<\/p>\n

Prior research showed that inactive estrogen is excreted into the intestine and broken down by microbes. A large percentage of the discarded estrogen is reactivated and reabsorbed into the bloodstream, the researchers explained.<\/p>\n

The new study found that the microbial composition of the estrobolome\u2014the subset of the gut microbiome that breaks down discarded estrogen\u2014is 11 times more diverse in formula-fed infants than in their breastfed counterparts. It is twice as diverse in people in industrialized populations than it is in people in non-industrialized settings, according to the study.<\/p>\n

This latter finding is surprising given that the gut microbiomes of individuals in industrialized societies are usually less diverse because people who live in them have less exposure to bacteria than those who live in non-industrialized societies, Bribiescas says.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s results suggest that lifestyle and environment influence hormone regulation and people\u2019s lifetime exposure to estrogen, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cFurther study is needed to pinpoint the specific causes of greater estrogen recycling in industrialized populations, but diet is likely an important factor,\u201d Bribiescas says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther contributing factors could be reduced physical activity, improved sanitation, and greater access to health care often associated with living in an industrialized population.\u201d<\/p>\n

Differences in estrogen levels have significant health implications for men and women because the hormone is important to cardiovascular, bone, brain, metabolic, and reproductive health, as well as fertility, growth and development, the researchers says. But more research is required to understand whether increased or decreased estrogen recycling is beneficial or harmful, as health outcomes likely depend on individual physiology and situational contexts, they say.<\/p>\n

\u201cEstrogens influence many aspects of physiology and health, and yet we don\u2019t know if the estrobolome is an important player in sexual maturation, childhood growth, reproduction, and risk of breast cancer,\u201d says Jasienska.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks to a grant from Polish National Science Foundation, we are starting a project that will provide answers to some of these important questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: Yale<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Share this Article You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. A new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[12358,103,61,60,167754],"class_list":["post-424073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-estrogen","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-microbiomes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}