3.4. Gut Microbiome
After quality filtration, a total of 6,152,753,266 high-quality reads were obtained from 160 samples with an average of 5,786,269 ± 38,454,708 reads per sample. By using DADA2 denoising, 17,915 ASVs were obtained for the downstream microbiome analysis. Shannon entropy and Pielou’s evenness were calculated to evaluate the microbial diversity and evenness in all the samples. There was no significant difference in microbial community diversity between the samples of the three different treatment groups before and after supplementation (As indicated by the principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) based on Bray–Curtis and Weighted UniFrac distances (Overall, the results indicated that β-cryptoxanthin consumption of up to 6 mg/day had no significant effect on microbial composition compared with placebo and did not alter the relative abundance of individual microbial species compared with baseline.