This is potentially huge news. If it can be replicated you can take all the high-fat/low-fat, high-carb/low-carb, paleo whatever diets and chuck them. "we show

This is potentially huge news. If it can be replicated you can take all the high-fat/low-fat, high-carb/low-carb, paleo whatever diets and chuck them. "we show that one endotoxin-producing bacterium isolated from a morbidly obese human’s gut induced obesity and insulin resistance in germfree mice." "Germ-free mice" are mice raised from before birth with no germs, so the effect of a single infection can be observed without complications. They claim that a single bacterium strain from a human gut, infected into mice, gave them not just obesity but insulin resistance and inflammatory symptoms -- a close analog of the complex we call "metabolic syndrome" in obese people. If even some cases of metabolic syndrome can be linked to a simple bacterium -- and cured simply by killing that bug -- this will have the economic and medicinal effects of, well, not the eradication of smallpox, but pretty close. Scientifically it's the equal of marshal and warren finding the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers -- and they got the Nobel for medicine for that.