Research into the gut bacterial environment – the microbiota – interests me more and more. It seems that the state of our health, appearance and well-being depends to a large extent on the quality and quantity of bacteria inhabiting our body. It seems to me that very soon obesity, not to mention a little excess weight, will be cured by adjusting the microbiota. It would be very simple, would you agree?)))
I have already studied my microbiota with the help of the American company Ubiome and made useful conclusions :). If you want to do the same, in Russia you need to contact Atlas.
In this article I want to talk about another study on the influence of human intestinal microflora on his weight.
Why diets make us fat (Why Make Us Fat) Is the title of a new book by neuroscientist Sandra Emodt. The main conclusion of the author is that it is the loss of weight as a result of diet that pushes the body to gain weight again. Because, for example, your body’s metabolism drops sharply after losing weight, that is, you have to eat much, much less than you ate during the diet in order to maintain the result.
But I find it more exciting to explore the links between human gut flora and weight loss.
There are tens of trillions of bacteria in the human gut that help us break down and digest food: they allow us to extract much more energy from food than our digestive enzymes could extract on their own.
How bacteria help us digest food
During the experiment, the researchers bred “sterile” mice without any gut bacteria and placed them in an isolated chamber. These mice ate 29% more food, but they had 42% less fat than normally raised mice.
If sterile mice are transplanted with gut bacteria from a normal mouse, they eat as much as a normal mouse, and within two weeks their body fat increases by 60%. But when the gut bacteria of obese mice are transplanted into sterile mice, they gain almost twice the weight as when the bacteria were sourced from a lean mouse.
Certain types of bacteria cause weight gain because they are particularly efficient at extracting energy from food by breaking down complex carbohydrates. For people who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, this improved digestion can provide an additional 140-180 kilocalories per day.
Gut bacteria affect nutrient absorption in a variety of ways. For example, they slow down the movement of food through the intestines or increase the production of an enzyme that transfers glucose from the small intestine into the blood. They also inhibit the enzyme lipoprotein lipase, which limits the ability of fat cells to absorb fatty acids and triglycerides from the blood. Suppression of this enzyme leads to an increase in fat stores. This mechanism is key in obesity: as shown by the experiment with mice, if you block it, then sterile mice after transplantation of intestinal bacteria gain only 10% of their weight instead of 60%.
The number of different types of bacteria in the gut also matters. People with less diverse intestinal microflora are more prone to obesity and metabolic syndrome, which are factors of cardiovascular disease and diabetes mellitus.
Although researchers have learned some of the details of how gut bacteria affect weight, they have not yet learned how to apply this knowledge to help people lose weight. The critical difference between animal research and clinical therapy is that doctors cannot transplant bacteria to “sterile” people, but must work with species already present in the gut. Changing the microflora has nothing to do with prescribing a medicine and is more like trying to restore a damaged habitat. Different types of bacteria compete with each other, and the outcome of their interactions is difficult to predict.
Another problem is to determine the optimal composition of microflora. After all, it changes, for example, seasonally, and must correspond to the real human diet (bacteria that digest fiber are unlikely to find something edible in the intestines of the average city dweller).
However, it is definitely clear that bacteria can be our friends in the fight against obesity and other ailments, so it makes sense to follow the research on this topic and study your microbiota right now.