Another blow to the mindless thermodynamic theory, and hope for a breakthrough:
Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.
They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.
Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.
I’ve always been thin, regardless of what I ate (though as I got older, I did put on a few pounds, which came back off when I went paleo), and have never felt particularly virtuous about it. I don’t have much patience for thin people who lecture fat ones about their caloric intake. People do have different metabolisms, and what you eat can affect it, but the “diet and exercise” nazis don’t want to believe it.
Kind of interesting that they’re effectively promoting energy inefficiency. That is … wasting food.
A few months ago a Chinese researcher linked gut bugs to both obesity and diabetes. link
When that story came out I started a thread on a Star Trek board that has been dragging on ever since, so after this latest research I added:
This also might be a good time to ponder on something I think I mentioned before in this thread, could the obesity “epidemic” be in some way linked to our overuse of anti-biotics, creating frequent open niches in our gut flora that provide opportunities for re-colonization by the less-desirable bacteria? Basically, why did this only become a problem lately?
Another idea to consider is that these bacteria can’t normally thrive because they simply run their host out of energy (as most species face pretty harsh constraints on food input because they’re already living on the margins) or get their host eaten as fast as an obese gazelle in a lion cage.
If food input is constrained, it should result in a less-fit host, or perhaps less total food for the bacteria, limiting their success. Or perhaps in their normal host they serve a very useful function in helping put on winter fat for hibernation and are tuned to respond to particular types of caloric intake, and by happenstance we both picked them up and started eating in a way that somewhat matches their natural host.
There are lots of interesting evolutionary questions raised by these bugs, since it is an issue where the ecosystem in our guts interfaces with the ecosystem in the great big world of hunting and gathering.