Health
Related: About this forumGut Bacteria From Thin Humans Can Slim Mice Down
The trillions of bacteria that live in the gut helping digest foods, making some vitamins, making amino acids may help determine if a person is fat or thin.
The evidence is from a novel experiment involving mice and humans that is part of a growing fascination with gut bacteria and their role in health and diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohns disease. In this case, the focus was on obesity. Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.
The study, published online Thursday by the journal Science, is pretty striking, said Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, an obesity researcher and the dean of the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with the study. Its a very powerful set of experiments.
Michael Fischbach of the University of California, San Francisco, who also was not involved with the study, called it the clearest evidence to date that gut bacteria can help cause obesity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/health/gut-bacteria-from-thin-humans-can-slim-mice-down.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130906
hedgehog
(36,286 posts)maybe this is the mechanism.
bananas
(27,509 posts)Ew gross!
SheilaT
(23,156 posts)I'll take the new gut bacteria.
I'm one who was always very thin in my youth, famous for being able to eat large quantities of food and never gain weight. Around age 16 that started to change. Now that I'm 65 I constantly struggle to keep my BMI at the overweight, and not into the obese number. I feel as if I eat almost nothing and still stay heavy.
I do understand that I don't exercise enough, but there still seems to be an ease of weight gain that is disproportionate.
I have two sons who remain thin, and I hope they always stay that way.