Solid‐state fermented Chinese alcoholic beverage (baijiu) and ethanol resulted in distinct metabolic and microbiome responses

What is it about?

Alcoholic beverages are extensively consumed all over the world. Although it is indisputable that alcohol use/abuse may cause liver damage and therefore, is one of the leading risk factors for chronic liver diseases, an increasing body of literature reported that many alcoholic beverages contain large amounts of small molecule bioactive compounds. Chinese Baijiu (CB) is a type of traditional Chinese fermented alcoholic beverage produced from cereals by multi-strain and solid-state fermentation techniques that produce large numbers of various fermentation metabolites, such as esters, alcohols, aldoketones, acids and many bioactive compounds including short chain fatty acids, phenols and heterocyclic compounds. Many of these compounds were reported to be beneficial for our gut microbiota which plays an important role in the development of alcoholic liver disease. Thus, we hypothesize that the small molecule flavor compounds derived from bacterial fermentation during the production process are able to alter the human gut microbiome and metabolome in a beneficial way. In this article, we compared the effects of CB and ethanol intervention on liver in experimental mice model and elucidated mechanisms underlying how CB impact the liver condition through complex metabolic interactions between the host and gut microbiota. Our results provided experimental evidence for the beneficial contents of fermented alcoholic beverages that may address the controversies concerning the health disparities resulted from consumption of different alcoholic beverages.

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