There is a very interesting connection to weight gain resulting from a gut illness. A couple took a trip to Peru in 2008. They backpacked up the Inca Trail to the Amazon, where they caught a particularly nasty bout of diarrhoea. They seemed to recover, however, it flared up again. Both took the same antibiotic to get rid of the bug.

When they returned home, the couple resumed their usual diet and lifestyle, except the man started to lose weight. He was already overweight by about 80 pounds. Over the next few months he dropped nearly six stones and went from being obese to a healthy body weight. His partner lost no weight at all.

“I believe the difference was related to a radical change in my microbes,” said Rob Knight. “We each responded differently to the same disease and the same course of treatment.” Knight has related his experience in his book, Follow your Gut (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Knight, a professor at the University of California in San Diego, is an expert on human microbes – tiny cell organisms, including bacteria and viruses. He is also the co-founder of the American Gut Project, a crowd-funded endeavour that has begun to chart all those microbes residing in and on the human body.

Thanks to the new DNA-sequencing technologies, scientists are able to explore what is turning out to be a vastly greater microscopic world within humans than they ever imagined. Their first glimpses are revealing that the microscopic life forms inside us are astonishingly numerous and diverse.

Our bodies comprise around 10 trillion cells, for example, but there are 100 trillion microbes in our eyes, ears, nose, belly button and especially our gut.

Apparently, these microbes (microbiota) and their millions of genes (the microbiome) are far more important than medical text books have acknowledged.

Worldwide, one in three adults is overweight and one in 10 is obese

So, while antibiotics are prescribed in record numbers, a huge body of research is proving that the microbes they are attacking are crucial to our health, regulating our immune systems and preventing disease, digesting our food, manufacturing vitamins and affecting everything from our mental health to our weight.

The microbiome and its impact on obesity, is one of the fastest moving areas of study, perhaps because it is one of the fastest growing epidemics of our time and linked to myriad other soaring health conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, musculoskeletal diseases, depression, anxiety and decreased life expectancy.

It is a problem that is rapidly engulfing the underdeveloped nations too. Worldwide, one in three adults is overweight and one in 10 is obese. The estimated 2.3 billion weighty people on the planet are more than the population of China, the US and all of Europe combined – and growing. (Blaser MJ. Missing Microbes, 2014).

We all know people who struggle to lose weight. No matter how much they starve themselves or visit the gym, they just cannot shed all of the excess. Then there are those people who seem able to eat nothing but junk food and stay skinny. New research is showing that our weight issues may have more to do with our gut than with calorie counting.

In a case study, reported last year, a woman undergoing a faecal microbiota transplant to fight a superbug bacterial infection in her gut suddenly gained a tremendous amount of weight. She was suffering from Clostridium difficile superbug infection, which is resistant to multiple courses of antibiotics. It has been shown that transferring a faecal sample from a healthy individual (containing their gut microbes) can restore the balance of the gut bacteria and conquer the disease, sometimes within hours. The NHS in the UK adopted this procedure in 2014.

In this woman’s case, she opted for a faecal transplant from her 16-year-old daughter, who was healthy, but at 140 pounds, she was overweight.

It worked, and the woman was cured of the infection, but within 16 months, she had, inexplicably, gained 34 pounds and was tipping the scales at 170 pounds. She had never been overweight before.

Three years later, despite diet and exercise, she weighed 177 pounds and her daughter’s weight had climbed to 170. The doctors concluded that some resident of her daughter’s microbiome must have made both women obese. They recommended that in future overweight people should be excluded from faecal donations.

Now scientists can predict, with 90 per cent accuracy, if a person is overweight just by looking at their gut microbes. The real challenge, however, is determining exactly which microbes are causing the trouble and how to fix it.

Knight says that his goal, in his lab, is to design a microbe community that actually slims down a mouse (or preferably a person). Some researchers suspect that due to the hundreds of microbes in the human gut, the microbial patterns of obesity may be individualised. It is also increasingly likely that an antibiotic approach to disease may have got us into this fat problem in the first place.

Next week we will look in more depth at this issue and at microbiome enhancing superfoods.

kathryn@maltanet.net

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