You gut bacteria determine your weight!

 

My weight is determined by my gut bacteria? Really? Probably yes. But how would that happen?

Research from Jeffery Gorden’s lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that your gut bacteria affect your weight. Last week, they published an interesting paper on Sci Transl Med with title “ The Effect of Diet on the Human Gut Microbiome: A Metagenomic Analysis in Humanized Gnotobiotic Mice”( http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/1/6/6ra14.abstract) .  As we know, trillions of microbes live inside our gut, and one of their functions is to process parts of foods that we can’t digest on our own. The gut bacteria population among different people having different diets is various. Gorden lab's studies have suggested that certain population of microbes may be associated with obesity. In order to understand how gut bacteria population responses to the change in diets, antibiotics, or dietary supplements, and eventually changes our weight, Gorden and his colleagues took gut microbes from human feces and transplant them into the intestinal tracts of germ-free mice. By using powerful DNA sequencing tools, they showed that the mice end up with gut microbes that mimic the populations found in the original human sample. Then, they investigated what would happen to these microbes if mice were switched from their standard low-fat, plant-rich mouse chow to a high-fat and sugar diet. What amazed them is that the mice gut microbial population change abruptly in less than 24 hours, which certain members of that society of microbes became very dominant, and certain members became more diminutive. The more striking is when this new collection of human microbes was transplanted into germ-free mice, the mice gained an increased amount of fat tissue even when fed low-fat diets, compared to mice that got human microbes from mice fed low-fat diets, suggesting that our gut bacteria really shape the way we respond to food.

 

To learn more about Gorden’s lab and research, please check the following link:

http://gordonlab.wustl.edu/People.html

 

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