system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does human gut flora evolve significantly over the course of the human's life?

I know bacteria and what-not tend to evolve fairly rapidly due to their short lifecycles but do the bacteria that we have to digest our food evolve much over the course of our lifetimes?

As a related question does our diet affect them significantly enough to cause them to evolve?
gpt
Yes and Yes.

The research on this field is quite young and just beginning to return useful data, but it's already clear that our gut microbiome is incredibly diverse, even for closely related people in the same environment, and it changes over the course of your life. It's also clear that everything from diet to the way you were born (vaginal or c-section) can have an impact on what populations are present at any given time of life.

Unfortunately, we don't really know exactly how diets affect these populations exactly (there's some data from small numbers of subjects), and we don't even know what the "ideal" population balance is. Hell, we don't even know all the species that are present, most of the studies that have been done just look at the total gene profile *en mass*. Most of the microbes in are gut have not been cultured in a lab.