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The Future of Dieting Is Personalized Algorithms Based on Your Gut Bacteria
- zzalpha 11y agoWell that doesn't make sense... calories in, calories out, thermodynamics, it's as simple as that, right?!? Edit: Seems I've inadvertently demonstrated Poe's Law...
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- skxjf29582 11y agoNo one is overweight/obese because of gut bacteria. There may be marginal effects, but it's a bit like optimizing the tires on a soccer mom's mini-van.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoMarginal effects can add up quite quickly over a lifetime. Take someone 100 pounds overweight. That is 350000 Kcal more consumption in their lifetime than they should've had. Let's spread that over 10 years, or 35000 Kcal a year. That works out to about a 100 Kcal difference per day. Over 20 years, it would be about 50 Kcal. Now, they could've made different choices, and there are some people who stay a healthy weight by making different choices. But I would not dismiss small changes as being irrelevant because given the time scale, those changes do add up.
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- im3w1l 11y agoIt doesn't work quite like that, because there is a negative feedback loop. When you increase in weight your metabolism goes up. If you are at a steady weight and increase your consumption by 50 kcal a day, you will reach a new steady weight where your metabolism is 50 kcal more. 50 kcal extra a day means steady state weight increases by about 3 pounds or 1.5 kg.
- lsniddy 11y agoJust because its more complicated than calories in calories out doesnt mean its not true. http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/woman-becomes-obese-after-fecal-transplant-overweight-donor http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/woman-becomes-...
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- heydenberk 11y agoI find your metaphor agreeable but not your argument: I'd wager that many minivans are running far below optimal gas efficiency because their tires are under-inflated.
- zzalpha 11y agoNo one is overweight/obese because of gut bacteria. That is an excellent baseless assertion you have there! Care to back that up with facts? Or should we just take your word for it?
- wang_li 11y agoThe issue is that humans are not deterministic machines. We are often presented with internal urges and cravings. We are faced with stresses that lower our ability to maintain discipline. We have different needs, so you can't just adopt a one size fits all plan. And we do have different microbiomes that will create all sorts of issues with respect to our ability to make decisions, exercise and recover. So while it is fundamentally true that a calorie deficit will lead to weight loss, it's not trivial to create a consistent deficit while maintaining good nutrition.
- AndrewDucker 11y agohttp://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015/02/04/Woman-becomes-obese-after-fecal-transplant-from-overweight-donor/1581423067944/ http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015/02/04/Woman-becomes-obes... 35 pounds gained from changing her stomach bacteria.
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- soneca 11y agoMeasuring calories burnt and calories consumed is trickier than it looks reading nutriction facts and calories/hour tables. Also, your body is much smarter than you in adapting to changes to calories getting in and out. If you accept that human body do a lot more to influence your behavior than your consciousness realize, you have to admit that not all things depends solely on one's will. Calories consumption are one of those things. Also, you can study large groups of people for macro influences of a diet at humand body. But individually is known to provide a lot of diversity. Two people on the exactly same diet and exercise routine won't have the exactly same body effects. Much of that was put in the account of DNA. But maybe some of this is due to gut bacteria. That's a possibility worth researching.
- mattmanser 11y agoyour body is much smarter than you in adapting to changes to calories getting in and out I'm not entirely sure if you're alluding to it but starvation mode is a myth. I would also suggest subscribing to /r/loseit or /r/progresspics for a while and seeing how many of the success stories involve anything more than "I stopped eating so much and now I'm thin!". Sometimes it's "I started keto/paleo, which meant I wasn't eating many calories and now I'm thin!".
- rickdale 11y agoWhile you can apply calories to those situations, at best calories is an incomplete model. A can of tuna and a can of coke both have 120calories. Yet its obvious that those are going to effect the bodies systems in different ways. Also, weight is just one measurement. People that eat paleo and other diets often improve all their health numbers like blood pressure and other stuff. So there is a bigger picture to grasp.
- mattmanser 11y agoWhy is it obvious? These are the exact questions that nutritionists are trying to answer without the benefit of being able to force people to eat what they want to test because they're in a Nazi death camp. Do you know, for example, that poor Japanese in the navy used to just eat rice. Nothing else. Just plain rice: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy-f985772c81a6#.5u8adggna https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost... Some had to be forced to eat protein by chopping it up into the rice. Or that someone did a twinkie diet and it worked: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/ http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...
- mistermann 11y agoMetabolism?
- cheepin 11y agoDoesn't matter that much for the majority of people: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-people/ http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...
- colordrops 11y agoI know you are being facetious, but the attitude you are making fun of is pervasive across the internet. In this specific case, people are not considering that lesser and greater amounts of ingested calories are excreted depending on how much was absorbed during the digestion process. More generally, people cargo cult some scientific sound bite and then stubbornly defend it without considering that they may be wrong since they are backed by "science".
- VeejayRampay 11y agoCandid question : Is gut bacteria (in terms of variety, strains, etc) affected by diet? Foods like kefir or some yogurts are known to influence the bacterial fauna, so just wondering.
- cowpewter 11y agoYes. There's been other studies that have compared the biodiversity of the gut in some of the few modern hunter-gatherer societies to western ones, and the hunter-gatherers have far more diverse varieties of gut bacteria than us westerners do[1]. And also that people with more diverse gut bacteria tend to be leaner and healthier[2]. It's likely (though I don't know if there's been specific studies in this direction yet), that the reason Americans have gotten so fat over the past few decades even when controlling for average calorie intake, is that our diet of mostly highly processed foods reduces gut biome diversity. [1] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140415/ncomms4654/full/ncomms4654.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140415/ncomms4654/full/nco... [2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7464/full/nature12506.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7464/full/nature1...
- 6stringmerc 11y agoThat's a good point. I'd also think that certain gut issues - heartburn, etc - are variables that can be changed via medication? Thinking of Nexium here. While it's an interesting approach, I am reminded of the former NFL linebacker Bill Romanowski, who frequently had his blood/urine/stool samples analyzed. I'm pretty sure that trio of tests is proven to work at identifying the same kinds of things, but that's just a hunch.
- aschearer 11y agoA vegan or vegetarian diet alter the gut biome[1] "Maintaining a strict vegan or vegetarian diet results in a significant shift in the microbiota while total cell numbers remain unaltered." Another study[2] found that the biome changes as soon as one day after changing diets. 1: http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v66/n1/full/ejcn2011141a.html http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v66/n1/full/ejcn2011141a.... 2: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/817769 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/817769, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7484/full/nature12820.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7484/full/nature1...
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- kbenson 11y agoBefore you dismiss the downvotes as people being overly PC or ignoring what you view as obvious, consider the following: Having that opinion is fine. Starting it without any evidence or reasoning isn't useful and doesn't advance the discussion. Useless comments get downvoted.
- rasz_pl 11y agoEvidence? Ever been to mcdonald?? Fat people eat buckets of food and drink gallons of soda. No amount of gut bacteria engineering is going to help someone eating 3 pizzas and 2 fried chickens per day.
- kbenson 11y agoHave you considered that gut bacteria might actually affect what we consider appetizing, and what we crave? There's a lot of interesting things that gut bacteria seem to affect[1]. So, while gut bacteria may not help much in people that have problems in the quantity of food you eat, maybe it might affect the quality. > Evidence? Ever been to mcdonald?? Fat people eat buckets of food and drink gallons of soda. Which is a correlation. But what we're finding is that the causation, while there, may not entirely account for it or be entirely accurate. Do we blame the uneducated entirely for their circumstances, or do we accept that there are many factors that go into their current life circumstances, and there's a cycle in place that makes it hard to make meaningful changes, and put processes in place to increase the chances that those that desire positive change are able to succeed? Why is this any different (especially if gut bacteria can affect how you think, feel, and what you hunger)? To be fair, it's entirely possible that this is all bullshit, and none of it will work. But just saying people are fat because they go to McDonalds and eat a lot doesn't make you insightful, it just makes you ignorant. 1: http://www.radiolab.org/story/197242-gut-feelings/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/197242-gut-feelings/
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- abledon 11y agoSidenote: This was figured out ~4000 years in the PAST according to Ayurveda(edit: and TCM as the cultures were sharing information), its documented in Sanskrit texts which themselves were recorded after only millennia of oral tradition
- TTPrograms 11y agoUh, source? I can't imagine anyone was too preoccupied with dieting 4000 years ago.
- rndmind 11y agoI misread this as " The Future of Dating ... "
- johndavi 11y agoThe New Yorker had solid overview -- i.e., "how much we know about how little we know" -- of the gut microbiome in 2012: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/germs-are-us http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/germs-are-us The calories-in, calories-out crowd isn't wrong thermodynamically speaking (I am fairly certain!), but an important component of that is how many calories are being taken-up by bacteria and how many are passed through without being utilized. If my gut sucks up 20% more calories from the same food as someone else, I'm going to have a harder time managing my weight than he/she will... even if we eat and 'move' at precisely the same amounts.
- Consultant32452 11y agoWhile this research is interesting I don't know that it will ultimately be all that valuable to the average person in the real world. For the average person who just wants to lose some weight, we all know that we need to consume fewer calories. And if we still don't lose weight we need to consume fewer calories still. It's not that complicated. The core problem is actually going through with it and sticking to your reduced calorie intake. Getting your gut bacteria algorithm worked out for you isn't going to matter if you're still sneaking in the soda and Snickers as extra calories. I think the only real-world beneficiaries of this research will be people on the far end of the spectrum of health/body hacking like body builders or world class athletes. I suppose also people who are hospitalized for obesity related issues, but those are a small fraction of the population.
- johndavi 11y agoChanges in the gut could be quite profound -- well beyond caloric uptake. It's quite likely that gut bacteria influences mood and other things we commonly attribute solely to the brain. If that's the case who knows the impact gut biome changes could make on desire, "willpower," adherence to a diet, the allure of "soda and Snickers" compared to other foods.
- nommm-nommm 11y agoGut bacteria effects you in every way possible. Changing your gut bacteria may help you avoid Snickers and soda. Your gut bacteria may be effecting your hunger, motivation, mood, and all sorts of stuff. See also: Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was... >They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans. Gut bacteria may play a role.
- jokoon 11y agoI even wonder if there could be some simple questionnaire about their parents heredity directly suggesting people to eat whatever could help their gut bacteria. Also I've read that the gut bacteria is not very well understood (hard to reproduce in a lab).
- chrismealy 11y agoDo people who don't eat sugar ever have a problem with being overweight? I stopped eating sugar 18 months ago to help my sinuses (it worked), and as a side effect lost about 30 pounds. Basically my appetite shrunk. I wasn't even trying to lose weight, it just happened.
- platz 11y agohow do you "not eat sugar"? sugars are in every food...
- Mikeb85 11y agoProbably means added sugar...
- neverminder 11y agoHe probably meant processed foods, refined sugar, high GI carbs, that sort of stuff.
- nommm-nommm 11y agoIf he/she is talking about added sugar its still not too meaningful. Drinking a glass of OJ has no added sugar but its still very similar to drinking soda.
- chrisdbaldwin 11y agoStart by eating lots of fatty foots instead. Meat, vegetables, eggs, and nuts have very little to no sugar.
- pa5tabear 11y agoThe keto (short for ketogenic) diet is a popular name for this. You only eat proteins and fats as your macronutrients (with room for 20g or less of net carbs per day). You have to consciously choose to avoid carbohydrates, which can be difficult. But the energy/mood stability and quick weight loss are undeniable positive results.
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- swagv 11y agoSomeone currently inventing the smart toilet will soon rule them all.
- sandGorgon 11y agoanybody know what affordable glucose-monitoring devices can measure glucose responses at 5 minute intervals ? Would love to get my hands on one of those to test personal hypotheses
- guard-of-terra 11y agoWhat if it recommends me food that I don't like? What if cafeteria only offers non-compliant food on some days? What if I go to a party? What if I eat out with other people?
- ksk 11y ago"We all know the friend who eats what they want and is thin" - No, we don't. You can turn fat pretty much any person who is not suffering from serious metabolic disorders. If you think you've found an outlier who can eat, pick a random number here.. 6000 calories every day and still stay thin then you've probably found a genetic freak. Certainly such a person should be examined to see what genetic variations allow them to do that.
- slavik81 11y agoThe trick to eating whatever you want is not wanting all that much.
- cynoclast 11y agoThe future of dieting is burning more calories than you consume. Just like it has always been.