Diet modulated host metabolizable energy
The overall goal of our study was to modulate the gut microbiome and employ a quantitative paradigm with enough precision to detect within-participant responses to the diet intervention. A key contribution to understanding the role of the gut microbiome on energy balance involves fecal energy. Prior methods lack precision and often provide results as energy per gram of feces, which does not contextualize fecal energy in terms of dietary intake (which we precisely controlled) and makes it difficult to interpret the relationships of fecal energy to host phenotypes