The prevalence of metabolic diseases including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension and cancer has evolved into a global epidemic over the last century. The rate of these disorders is continuously rising due to the lack of effective preventative and therapeutic strategies. This warrants for the development of novel strategies that could help in the prevention, treatment and/ or better management of such disorders. Although the complex pathophysiology of these metabolic diseases is one of the major hurdles in the development of preventive and/or therapeutic strategies, there are some factors that are or can speculated to be more effective to target than others. Recently, gut microbiome has emerged as one of the major contributing factors in metabolic diseases, and developing positive modulators of gut microbiota is being considered to be of significant interest. Natural non-digestible polysaccharides from plants and food sources are considered potent modulators of gut microbiome that can feed certain beneficial microbes in the gut. This has led to an increased interest in the isolation of novel bioactive polysaccharides from different plants and food sources and their application as functional components to modulate the gut microbiome composition to improve host's health including metabolism. Therefore, polysaccharides, as prebiotics components, are being speculated to confer positive effects in managing metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes. In this review article, we summarize some of the most common polysaccharides from plants and food that impact metabolic health and discuss why and how these could be helpful in preventing or ameliorating metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia.
Keywords: Diabetes; Dyslipidemia; Gut; Hypertension; Metabolic syndrome; Microbiome; Microbiota; Obesity; Polysaccharides; Prebiotic; Probiotics.