deletions | additions       diff --git a/Abstract.md b/Abstract.md  index f948b93..b0d7ef4 100644  --- a/Abstract.md  +++ b/Abstract.md 
...
#Abstract  There is little Far more attention has been paid  to no information the microbes in our feces than the microbes in our food. Research efforts dedicated to the microbes that we eat have historically been focused  on a fairly narrow range of species, namely those which cause disease and those which are thought to confer some "probiotic" health benefit. Little is known about  the effects of ingested microorganisms microbial communities  that are present in our typical American  diets, andin fact,  even the basic questions of which microbes, how many of them, and how much they vary from diet to diet and meal to meal, have not been answered. We characterized the microbiota of three different dietary patterns in order to estimate: the average total amount of daily microbes ingested via food and beverages, and their composition in three daily meal plans representing three different dietary patterns. The three dietary patterns analyzed were: 1) the Average American (AA): focused on convenience foods, 2) USDA recommended (USDA): emphasizing fruits and vegetables, lean meat, dairy, and whole grains, and 3) Vegan (VEG): excluding all animal products. Meals were prepared in a home kitchen or purchased at restaurants and blended, followed by microbial analysis including aerobic, anaerobic, yeast and mold plate counts as well as 16S rRNA PCR survey analysis. Based on plate counts, the USDA meal plan had the highest total amount of microbes at \(1.3 X 10^9\) CFU per day, followed by the VEG meal plan and the AA meal plan at \(6 X 10^6 \)and \(1.4 X 10^6\) CFU per day respectively. There was no significant difference in diversity among the three dietary patterns. Individual meals clustered based on taxonomic composition independent of dietary pattern. For example, meals that were abundant in Lactic Acid Bacteria were from all three dietary patterns. Some taxonomic groups were correlated with the nutritional content of the meals. For example, the genus Blautia was negatively correlated with sugar content of the meal. Predictive metagenome analysis using PICRUSt found significant differences in certain functional KEGG categories across the three dietary patterns and for meals clustered based on whether they were raw or cooked. Further studies are needed to determine the impact of ingested microbes on the intestinal microbiota, the extent of variation across foods, meals and diets, and whether dietary microbes are implicated in disease processes. The answers to these questions will reveal whether dietary microbial approaches beyond probiotics taken as supplements - i.e. ingested as foods - are important contributors to the composition, inter-individual variation, and function of our gut microbiota.