Gut Bacteria May Determine Dieting Efficiency – CME Teaching Brief® – MedPage Today
Gut Bacteria May Determine Dieting Efficiency

By Neil Osterweil, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
December 21, 2006

ST. LOUIS, Dec. 21 — Bacteria in the gut may be arbiters of weight loss or gain, according to a revolutionary theory proposed by researchers here.

The way it works, said Jeffrey I. Gordon, M.D., of Washington University, and colleagues, is that when an overweight person goes on a diet, one group of efficient bacteria moves out of the gut and another less-efficient group moves in to fill the void.

This finding suggested that manipulation of intestinal microbes might some day be used to treat obesity, they reported in the Dec. 21 issue of Nature.

Back of the Pack: Battling the holiday bulge — with bacteria?
Battling the holiday bulge — with bacteria?
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Thursday, December 21, 2006 | 04:18 PM ET
By Peter Hadzipetros

Those clothes of yours feeling a little tighter these days as you just can’t resist the urge to nibble on those holiday goodies that someone always seems to leave lying around? Maybe you’re already looking around for the best deals on fitness club memberships — so you can start working off those extra pounds at the gym on Jan. 2.

If you want to avoid the weight gain, you should’ve started working on burning off those extra calories already. A couple of preventative walks could’ve earned you a few guilt-free shortbread cookies.

It takes substantially more to work off your basic Christmas dinner — even a modest feast can add up to 4,000 calories or more pretty quickly. The average 155-pound person would have to walk 55 kilometres to work that off.

Does a bug in our gut make us fat? – Los Angeles Times
Does a bug in our gut make us fat?
The obese have higher levels of bacteria that free up more calories.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
December 21, 2006

Obese people have higher levels of unusually efficient bacteria in their guts than lean people do, offering a possible explanation for why they get fat, researchers reported today.

Humans need bacteria in their guts to help convert otherwise indigestible foods into a form that is digestible, and the bacteria in obese people are better at the process, a team from Washington University in St. Louis reported in two papers published in the journal Nature.