Are Your Gut Bugs Making You Fat?
We’re guessing you don’t ask yourself very often “Are my gut microbiomes making me fat?” Well, maybe you should according to a new research from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sport.
What the research group did was study the feces (or the poo) of 85 Danish people to estimate how effective their gut microbes are at extracting energy for food. Then, they map the composition of the gut microbes for each participant. Researchers found that around 40% of the participants belong to a group that had a microbiome that extracted more energy from food compared to the other 60%. They also observed that participants who extracted the most energy from food also weighed 10% more on average, which amounted to a whopping 9 kilos and that can be a huge difference.
This study builds on an animal research from a near decade ago that looked at the composition of microbes in mice. Researchers found that they could take obese or diabetic mice who have a different composition, take a sample of their microbiome and do a fecal transplant onto healthy mice. Over the proceeding few weeks, the healthy mice would develop either obesity or diabetes. There was also some follow-up research a number of
years ago that showed how obese individuals tended to have different composition of bacteria in their guts than non-obese individuals.
The bacteria in question are called bacterial, which is a species of bacterium. The other one that tends to be more dominant in leaner individuals are firmicutes. This study proved that if you have two people who are eating the exact same calorie diet, eating the same composition of the diet as well as the calories, moving the same sleep, doing everything
else the same, you can have people who will put on weight on a diet and other people could lose weight on this diet. So, having a predominance of these bacterial is not a good thing.
Initially, the researchers thought that those who harvested more energy would have a longer transit time of the food through the gastrointestinal system. To their surprise, those who had the predominance of bacterial had a shorter digestive travel time and more energy was extracted even in that short amount of time.
So what to do with this information? Get your microbiome tested at least once every couple of years. In Australia, there is a microbiome analysis company called Microba. The beauty of this company is that they have highly qualified nutritionists and dieticians. If you buy a test kit, they will give you a debrief on your whole microbiome and your report stays with them so as they get more and more data around it, you’ll actually see that your report starts to get more details.
For now, know that the composition of the microbiome can have a huge influence on your weight, like 9 kilos is not insignificant. People, even if they go on a diet, will really struggle if they have a high predominance of bacterial. And this new research shows that the composition of your gut microbiome can have a huge impact on your physical and mental disease risk. So final note, if you’re struggling to lose weight, it may be the composition of your microbiome.
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