The things you never knew about fibre, inflammation and the human microbiome

A quiet global health problem hiding in plain sight

When we first began researching seaweed fibre more than ten years ago, we weren’t trying to jump on a wellness trend. We were responding to something far more confronting: how much fibre had been stripped from modern diets — and what that loss was doing to human health.

Today, the data has caught up with what we were seeing early. Low‑fibre diets are now linked to:

• Chronic inflammation

• Disrupted gut barriers

• Increased risk of bowel cancer

• Cardiometabolic disease

• Skin, immune and mucosal disorders

Globally, bowel cancer alone now costs humanity billions of healthy‑life days every year, and around 1 in 9 bowel‑cancer deaths are attributed to diets too low in fibre. This is not a fringe nutrition issue — it is a systems‑level health failure.

And fibre is not just about “regularity”. It is about how we evolved as a species.

We are not cows. We are not carnivores.

Humans sit in a very specific biological niche.

• We are not herbivores like cows or zebras, built to digest tough cellulose all day long.

• We are not carnivores, whose short guts and enzyme profiles are designed for protein and fat alone.

Instead, we are symbiotic omnivores — organisms whose survival depends on a diverse internal ecosystem of microbes.

This means something crucial:

An animal is not just one organism.

A human is a partnership — a host plus trillions of bacteria that perform metabolic tasks we cannot do ourselves.

Without them, we cannot:

• Extract energy from many plant foods

• Produce key vitamins and metabolites

• Maintain our gut lining

• Regulate immune responses

• Control inflammatory signalling

Fibre is the primary way we feed this hidden half of ourselves.

The zookeeper analogy (and why modern diets fail us)

Imagine running a zoo.

You would never feed:

• Bamboo to a lion

• Steak to a panda

• Gum leaves to a leopard

Each animal has evolved with a specific gut architecture and microbiome. Feed them the wrong food and their health collapses.

Now imagine humans living inside a nutritional zoo — one where ultra‑processed foods dominate, fibre diversity is minimal, and microbial exposure from soils and plants is radically reduced.

That is modern life.

Our microbiome is expected to function like it did for hundreds of thousands of years — but with industrial food, simplified agriculture, depleted soils and extreme dietary uniformity.

The result?

• Inflammation

• Barrier breakdown (gut, skin, lung, vaginal)

• Immune dysregulation

• Metabolic stress

Not because humans are fragile — but because the system is too fast and too simplified for biology to adapt.

True herbivores survive by passing fibre down a microbial assembly line.

Take a zebra grazing grass:

• The zebra cannot digest cellulose

• Its microbes do the work

• Each microbial group breaks fibre down further

• The animal ultimately feeds on microbial metabolites, not the grass itself

This is why herbivore microbiomes are extraordinarily diverse.

Humans do something similar — but with different fibres.

We don’t rely on woody cellulose. Instead, our evolution favoured:

• Soluble fibres

• Fermentable fibres

• Gel‑forming fibres

• Sulphated fibres

• Mixed plant polysaccharides

This diversity allowed humans to:

• Move across continents

• Eat seasonally

• Adapt to different climates

• Thrive on varied food cultures

But only if that diversity is maintained.

Fibre is not one thing — it is an ecosystem

When people talk about fibre, they often mean it as a single number.

In reality, fibre diversity matters as much as fibre quantity.

Humans evolved eating:

• Insoluble fibres (bulk and transit)

• Soluble fibres (gels and fermentation)

• Resistant starches

• Pectins

• Beta‑glucans

• Sulphated glycans (from seaweeds and connective tissues)

Each feeds different microbial guilds, producing different metabolites that:

• Reduce inflammation

• Strengthen gut and skin barriers

• Support immune tolerance

• Signal to the brain and endocrine system

Remove this diversity, and the microbiome collapses into a simplified, industrialised version of itself.

Humanised microbiomes and intergenerational effects

Research now shows that:

• Captive animals develop “humanised” microbiomes

• These microbiomes are less diverse and less resilient

• Similar shifts occur in humans eating industrial diets

Even more striking: microbiome changes can be passed down generations.

What you eat today does not just affect you — it can influence the microbial inheritance of your children, and potentially their children.

In a rapidly changing climate and food system, losing this adaptability is not trivial.

From gut to skin: why inflammation shows up everywhere

The gut is not isolated.

It is:

• The largest immune organ in the body

• A major signalling hub

• A regulator of systemic inflammation

When fibre intake drops and microbial balance shifts:

• Gut permeability increases

• Inflammatory signals rise

• Skin barriers weaken

• Sensitivity, dryness and reactivity increase

This is why gut health and skin health are inseparable — and why our research has always spanned nutrition, microbiology and biomaterials.

Learning from the past (and modernising it)

Over a century ago, Maximilian Bircher‑Benner observed that people eating diverse, plant‑rich diets fared better.

His ideas were sometimes dismissed as mystical — yet today, microbiome science explains why.

Importantly, “wholefoods” does not mean raw or unprocessed.

• Fermentation can improve nutrition

• Cooking can increase bioavailability

• Processing can be beneficial when done intelligently

Context matters more than dogma.

Why seaweed fibre matters

Seaweeds introduce fibres that land plants cannot provide.

In particular, sulphated glycans:

• Form protective gels

• Support mucosal linings

• Feed beneficial bacteria such as Bifidobacteria

• Help regulate immune signalling

These fibres have been largely removed from modern diets — yet they were historically common in coastal cultures.

Our work over the past decade has focused on bringing this missing fibre diversity back — safely, sustainably and with clinical validation.

Simple, sane, and human

Nutrition does not need to be extreme to be effective.

A strong foundation looks like:

• Real food

• Predominantly plants

• Diverse fibres

• Some fermentation

• Thoughtful inclusion of foods from land and sea

Humans are adaptable — but only when we feed the ecosystem within us.

Fibre is not filler.

It is infrastructure for health.

Written by Pia Winberg