22 ms·
Body fat link to bacteria in feces
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoAnybody with fecal transplant experience care to comment?
- emodendroket 10y agoHow many people does that really describe?
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoI couldn't easily find statistics but I do know of four people first hand. One after a coma, one after a horrendous decision to have a liquid only diet, and two after eating something very dodgy whilst climbing. Lets be honest, it isn't the procedure I would run to tell people that I have had.
- richardthered 10y agoHow did it work for them? Did they share results? I've seen that fecal matter transplants (FMTs) have been quite successful in curing C. Diff. infections that are unresolved by conventional treatments.
- DougWebb 10y agoA friend of mine has his microbiome wiped out by heavy antibiotics administration while fighting colon cancer. After his cancer went into remission, he suffered greatly from IBS. It got bad enough that his doctors thought his cancer had returned and started him on chemo again, despite negative results when testing for cancer. That just made things worse. Eventually he decided the antibiotics caused the problem and that FMT was a possible solution. It took him a long time to find a doctor who would treat him with FMT; no one in the US or Canada would do it and he wound up having to go to London for a month. The change was immediate. His IBS disappeared completely, he's able to eat foods again that he couldn't touch for several years, he's reversed his drastic weight loss and is healthy again.
- xvcyiux 10y agoout of interest, where exactly did your friend get their FMT done ?
- DougWebb 10y agoI don't know exactly, and wouldn't be at liberty to say if I did. It wasn't easy for him to find a doctor willing to treat him, because of his cancer. He's now the subject of an ongoing experimental study though, and hopes the results will be published soon and based on that he hopes the doors will open to more people getting this treatment.
- theprotocol 10y agoI may need to do this. I've become extremely intolerant to ~80% of food types. I'm told it's "IBS" but it's accompanied by neurological symptoms. I've seen dozens of doctors and gotten nowhere (the most "promising" diagnosis was abdominal epilepsy).
- emodendroket 10y agoI'm not sure why a fecal matter transplant would help if you're having neurological issues.
- theprotocol 10y agoThey're a reaction to food. Limiting my diet eliminates them completely. My doctors agree that it's related to food intolerance. What they cannot figure out is a firm diagnosis and treatment. The problem is that a very diverse set of foods can cause these reactions for me. It isn't as simple as, say, eliminating dairy. My diet is now very limited, to the point of affecting my general state of health. I'm subsisting on plain chicken, rice, spoonfuls of coconut milk, and a "healthy" fat supplement (containing monounsaturated fat), in addition to 2 restaurant dishes which I can tolerate (I've tried dozens). If I make a dietary mistake, I basically end up with intestinal symptoms accompanied by neurological symptoms (including externally visible twitches among other things) , not to mention typical allergy-like symptoms i.e. throat constriction, sinus inflammation etc, although I'm told it's not a true allergy, but an intolerance. The doctors I've seen have been stumped. But there's no question it all comes down to the gut. I've heard "abdominal epilepsy" being thrown around (after having done numerous tests) but things have not advanced from there. Other ideas were histamine intolerance, celiac sprue, or crohn's disease but the latter two proved back negative after a small intestine biopsy. Probiotics do improve my symptoms a bit. Somewhat paradoxically (but not really when you think about it), certain antibiotics also clear up my symptoms temporarily. The neurological symptoms are inseparable from the abdominal ones; they always happen at the same time, and it's always primarily an intestinal issue in terms of how it begins (stomach upset after eating something I'm intolerant to). To top things off, I'm underweight due to what I'm told is malabsorption. I've tried to make this post concise but there's a lot going on (and yet a lot I did not mention). I hope this explains why I'm considering FMT.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoWell it's only come up because two of them say it's a wonder treatment and the other two couldn't keep a secret to save their lives. I can imagine if you had one and it didn't go well you wouldn't be particularly inclined to tell relative acquaintances.
- hammock 10y ago"Something very dodgy while climbing"? A frozen animal carcass?
- willismichael 10y agoI was thinking more along the lines of some unidentified fungus, but I'm just as curious as you are.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoI presume so, The two of them are prone to drinking games whilst climbing/caving and so it was assumed to be something from that until much later on where it was then suspected to be something touched and inadvertently consumed on their morning climb.
- justinph 10y agoI had one after having a c. diff infection. Didn't turn into a fatso. I did lose 25 lbs from the c. diff, though, now mostly gained back. We're very unclear about how the microbiome affects us; to be a FMT donor you must be in perfect health: not fat, no mental illness, etc. A FMT is not a panacea for everything that ails. It can cure c. diff, but the results of it for anything else are much less clear. We don't really know why it works and the long term effects of such a dramatic treatment are unknown.
- DougWebb 10y agoI don't know that I'd call FMT a dramatic treatment. It doesn't seem any more dramatic than a course of antibiotics, which we know wipes out most of your microbiome and tends to lead to IBS and weight gain, or taking probiotics which are intended to introduce bacteria strains into your microbiome.
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoTake a look at this book, he Second Brain : The Scientific Basis of Gut Instinct and a Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestines: http://amzn.to/2dmlrM4 http://amzn.to/2dmlrM4 It touches on how the enteric nervous system has similar structures to the brain and also produces neurochemicals. Interesting perspective.
- acjohnson55 10y agoThis strikes me as a classic place to consider whether this link is a correlation or a causation. It's really easy for me to imagine that diets likely to produce a great deal of body fat also produce a home for particular sorts of gut bacteria. It's less obvious, but it's also not such a stretch to imagine mechanisms for positive feedback, in which some of these bacteria reinforce chemical signals that lead to consumption of more of the food they thrive on.
- dragonwriter 10y agoIt's also not anything of a stretch to imagine that since gut bacteria are known to play a role in digestion, variations in them might effect the body's utilization of what is consumed.
- neximo64 10y agoIts also that while breaking down foods, some bacteria can provide chemicals as by products that indicate to one that they are full. It's perhaps not as clean cut as simple the efficiency of one's biology.
- neximo64 10y agoThere have been studies that show stool transplants can suddenly cause massive weight changes in individuals. As is often the case with treatments to IBS. It matches up a lot with this study. In addition a similar study has been tried on genetically identical twins. The difference being the bacteria. How someone cultivates these bacteria, still a mystery. It could be antibiotics as much as potato starches.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoI'd take any study based on IBD data with a large pinch of salt before applying to the general population. Anything that improves the state of the colon for a person with IBD/Crohn's/UC will cause a massive weight change. A few years back I had 30 cm of small intestine removed and promptly gained 20 kg in two months (which was a very good thing for me then). That obviously won't happen to someone normal.
- brianbreslin 10y agoWhat was the name of the startup that would analyze your biome?
- mox1 10y agohttp://ubiome.com/ http://ubiome.com/ There may be others...
- ruffrey 10y agoIf you eat only fruit, veggies and lean meat, it makes sense that your gut bacteria would be different from someone who eats high levels of processed carbs and sugars. The things you eat already are known to cause body fat. Links like this do not seem like a leap forward, to me. Did they control for the critically important variable: the subject's diet?
- nestlequ1k 10y agoThat's assuming that slim people are always people who eat perfectly healthy. Yet seems we all know that one skinny person who eats the worst food ever, and never gets fat.
- jtuente 10y agoProbably because that one skinny person eats jack-all outside of the times you are observing them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Domenic_S 10y agoNo, it's that some extreme outliers have insane BMRs. It's still a calories-in-calories-out situation, it's just their base calories out is so high without doing anything special it's like a superpower. I've only met a few, but it's a real thing! Most of us go through something similar (but to a lesser extent) in our teen years. A few seem to keep it forever.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoI'm curious whether anyone can provide some scientific evidence supporting the theory that these people actually burn calories faster? Seems like it should show up very clearly on their core body temperature (thermodynamics and all). An alternative hypothesis would be that these people have a less efficient digestive system, so more of the calories just pass through.
- anotherarray 10y agoAs a mere reader of this article, my only question is: Couldn't the bacteria be instead the result of a high body fat percentage?
- nibs 10y agoThe gut biome is self reinforcing. If you eat nothing but sugar (simplified example) the bacteria that thrive will be the ones that most resourcefully consume sugar. Other strains will wither away entirely or to a very insignificant state. Some, like yeast, actually kills 95% of the colony and the other 5% eat it, so it can take years to bring under control in people with immunocompromise (autoimmune disease, AIDS). If you eat nothing but fibrous vegetables (another simplified example) then your biome will be very different. And part of what makes you hungry is the nutrients the bacteria in your gut desire in order to maintain the colony. So you eat the right foods, then your body desires the right foods. You can re-program your biome to an extent by eating differently. And that goes for eating good or bad food. So I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is where the effect comes from.
- DougWebb 10y agoAn FMT jumpstarts that process, by introducing a bunch of colonists from a healthy microbiome all at once. Then you just need to nurture the new arrivals with proper diet, which you'll start to desire thanks to their influence. That's easier than changing your diet first (fighting what your microbiome wants) and hoping to pick up enough different bacteria for them to establish themselves.
- kbutler 10y agoI wonder what the time for adaptation is? That is, if I want to keep my gut biome un-optimized for absorbing calories from my diet, how often should I shift my diet from carb-heavy to protein-rich to ...
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoIf you eat fewer calories than you burn you lose weight. Period. Matter doesn't create itself from thin air. Fatties will oink about every 'cause' except their own behavior.
- _of 10y agoI still have not managed to find the original paper.
- swehner 10y agoThere are some here, https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/michelle.beaumont.html https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/michelle.beaumont.html
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- elsherbini 10y agoA recent meta-analysis came out and claimed to show that we don't have evidence right now for a link between obesity and what we've measured so far about the human microbiome [0]. I can imagine a regime where two people with the same diet but with very different bacterial communities would have different health outcomes. It toally makes sense to me that if you have bacteria that are better at breaking down long fats into absorbable molecules, that you'd be getting more effective calories from the same food compared to someone without those bacteria. In fact, this has been shown to work in mice in 2006 [1]. However, in the real world, you aren't living in a sterile cage. You can sample bacteria from the environment and your microbiome is allowed to change in response to your diet. It's possible that in this regime, your diet impacts your microbiome much more than your microbiome impacts the outcome of your diet. [0](http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/4/e01018-16 http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/4/e01018-16) - Looking For a Signal in the Noise - Revisiting Obesity and the Microbiome Sze and Schloss, mBio 2016 [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05414.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05... An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest Turnbaugh et. al., Nature 2006
- gadders 10y agoAnimals used for meat production are bred for their feed conversion ratio [1] i.e. how much body mass can they produce for a given amount of food. If this can vary within other mammals, I don't see a reason why it couldn't happen in humans. I'm not sure if it would necessarily be microbiome related. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
- hammock 10y agoSurprised this isn't referenced more when people bring up "calories in, calories out" edit: see my child comment if you somehow think I am arguing against the concept
- jtuente 10y agoProbably because it's still irrelevant to CICO. CICO doesn't tell you how much calories go in or out, rather it tells you to measure them wherever possible and make adjustments based on your weight changes.
- khattam 10y agoGive me any bacteria and I will keep the body fat low... you know, by just eating as much as my body needs?
- chriogenix 10y agoIsn't it possible that families tend to eat similar foods/diets and this social construct creates the obesity to begin with?