by Mike Geary
If you’ve been reading my newsletters for a while, then you know one of the biggest things I talk about is the importance of all those trillions of little “critters” in your gut (your probiotics, and the balance between good and bad bugs in your gut) that regulate so many important aspects of your health, including your immune system, digestion, your weight, and even brain health according to some recent studies.
After all, as you may have heard, we have 10x the amount of microbes in our body compared to the number of our own human cells in our body. Clearly, those 100 trillion “bugs” in your body control a LOT about your health considering they outnumber our own cells 10 to 1.
Well, recently I’ve been reading the thought-provoking new book by Michael Pollan called Cooked, and I ran across this excerpt, which is important and fascinating:
“Indeed, the microbiota may play an important role in regulating our weight. It has long been known that feeding antibiotics to livestock makes them gain more weight on the same amount of feed, and though the mechanism has not been identified, intriguing new clues are emerging. A group of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that the types of bacteria dominant in the gut of obese individuals (in both mice and humans) are very different from those found in slender people, and that the different species of gut bacteria metabolize food more or less efficiently.
This suggests that the amount of energy we obtain from a given amount of food may vary depending on the kinds of microbes living in your gut. So might changing the composition of our gut bacteria in turn change our weight? Possibly: The researchers found that when they transferred bacteria from the gut of fat mice into germ-free mice, the germ-free mice gained nearly twice as much weight as when they received gut bacteria from skinny mice. Other research has found that specific gut microbes, such as Helicobacter pylori (which are killed by antibiotics), play a role in regulating the hormones that control appetite.”
As you can see, the irresponsible use of antibiotics in livestock in the last 50 years and also the over-prescription of antibiotics in humans for every little minor sickness has been devastating the guts of humans and possibly making us fat just like livestock fatten up with the use of antibiotics.
This excerpt also raises intriguing points about the importance of our gut probiotics in regulating our weight considering the information about different gut microbes in obese vs slender people.