The Microbes in Your Gut May Be Making You Fat (2013)
livescience.com
livescience.com
I hope this article isn't suggesting that it is preferable to have less efficient digestive systems so that we can all eat more. Given the environmental impact of food production these efficient digestion microbes are something we should encourage. Maybe they are harmful because of insulin spikes ? But the article doesn't mention this.
I have a disease that makes me very inefficient in absorbing protein and vitamins.
The amount of stuff (in both food, and actual medicinal supplements) I consume to just keep my body working, of course has calories in it, I don't want a efficient calorie absorption...
What if some bacteria have evolved to "hack" the metabolic signals from our guts (and possibly other mammals)?
They could stimulate ghrelin to make us want more food to feed them. Or slow down food progress through the gut to give them more time to reproduce.
Environmentally the chief problem is that we are gorging ourselves on luxury foods (red meat as prime offender) that do enormous amounts of environmental damage and are actively harmful to our bodies. More broadly using the majority of farmland for animal feed is the issue. We need a major shift of diets to veggie.
(Awareness of animal treatment issues in the meat industry would help the cause too, but tangential issue...)
What is disconcerting is the idea of engineering your gut bacteria to be less efficient at absorbing calories and nutrients in order to not require self control about what you give your body in the first place.
If that's true then manipulating gut flora is less about allowing people to have no self control, but about helping people get back self control.
"If you want to stay lean, you'll want bacteria that are not very efficient," says Claire Fraser, a professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Wrong. Calorie surplus is neither necessary for nor a guarantee of fat gain.
When your calories in are greater than your calories out, you gain net energy content of body mass. If you have very low body fat already, you aren't going to be able to gain lean body mass without increasing net energy content, which means a calorie surplus; and a calorie surplus can sometimes, AFAIK, be beneficial in building lean body mass even if you haven't already driven your body fat %age to a very low level.
Conversely, you can gain body fat while losing lean body mass with a calorie deficit.
> What is disconcerting is the idea of engineering your gut bacteria to be less efficient at absorbing calories and nutrients in order to not require self control about what you give your body in the first place.
Why is that disconcerting? If excessive efficiency in this one function is associated with adverse health outcomes, and people with less efficient (than the level raising concern) gut microbiomes tend toward healthier weights and better health outcomes, preference for maximum efficiency in this area is a harmful microoptimization, like optimizing a firm's software development operations for maximum lines of code produced per day rather than business functionality delivered.
Do you have any sources for this? I'm curious because it matches my experience the handful of times I've attempted even fairly harsh caloric restriction. A month or two in and my weight drops such a small fraction of what all "weight loss" calculators suggest it should (like, 1/20) that I doubt the "calories in, calories out, it's so simple bro!" crowd would believe me.
Meanwhile, anaerobic exercise cuts fat and builds muscle on me like crazy. Way, way more effective. Too bad since I find it way easier to cut calories (time commitment of zero, if not negative).
I was excluding exercise from my (admittedly) very simplistic rule of thumb of weight gain. You seem to have a general understanding of nutrition, so I would say to you that it is absolutely disingenuous to those who don't have that understanding to say that calorie surplus != fat gain. It's a general rule, and it applies to the majority of people.
> Why is that disconcerting?
It's disconcerting in the same way that liposuction is disconcerting. You could make very similar arguments about liposuction as you did about gut engineering: if it improves health, then it's a good thing. But at the end of the day, it doesn't address the issue of being able to control what you do with your body in the interest of your health. Getting too fat? Just reset your gut bacteria, regardless of what other unknown hormone changes it will have. It's ridiculous.
Liposuction is generally cosmetic; I'm not aware of it ever being indicated for health reasons. (Though, given that, while most body fat changes do not involve changes in the number of fat cells, just growing or shrinking existing cells, extreme adult weight gain does result in gaining additional fat cells which don't go away with weight loss, its at least plausible that there might be some situations where it would be the best approximation to achieving the state the body would have had without the intervening extreme weight gain.)
> But at the end of the day, it doesn't address the issue of being able to control what you do with your body in the interest of your health.
If overweight people have more efficient gut microbiomes, the problem they have compared to normal-weight people isn't a self-control problem, its a gut biome problem. Insisting that it must be addressed as a self-control problem (dubious whatever the source of the problem is, if that's not the most efficient intervention) seems downright perverse.
Perverse is taking a high-functioning part of your body (the efficiency of your gut bacteria) and destroying completely it because you don't want to stop eating more than your body needs. Especially since we know how much our gut bacteria affects our body in general.
Viewing something operating out of normal parameters that provide desired outcomes is, as I stated upthread, a harmful microoptimization.
High-function is hitting the ideal for your needs, not just getting bigger numbers on some measure that ignores its role in the system. With many body systems, excessive function is bad, and when we understand how it is bad and how to treat it, we do.
We don't complain that is bad to treat a "high-functioning" immune system and that people with disorders resulting from overactive immune systems should instead learn the self-control to avoid triggers rather than seeking treatment.
I'm really surprised at how hard you are twisting what I've said.
> As I said elsewhere, we've barely scratched the surface of how our bodies are affected by changes in our gut bacteria, and you seem immediately on board with changing it completely in order to help lose weight.
Questioning your basis for finding the idea that interventions involving gut bacteria might be applied, and then challenging the validity of statements you offered in response is different from being "completely on board" with particular interventions. I think its an interesting line of research that opens up both a potential better understanding of the source of the current epidemic and, to some extent independently of whether it does that, might also open a very productive avenue for interventions in an area where the tools we have clearly aren't working very well.
> As I, and others, have said, there is a simpler solution, one that applies positively to all aspects of health and happiness in life: self-control.
Self-control is not a solution -- its a state. A solution is a course of action that can result in a desired state.
> But you seem bent on the idea that 2/3rds of adults considered overweight or obese have "abnormal gut bacteria"
Er, no, I've never said all overweight adults have abnormal gut bacteria. (I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant correlation, to be sure.)
> and the best solution for them is to completely rewrite it, consequences be damned.
I don't recall ever arguing that the best solution for all (or even any) is to do that; I have said if the evidence shows that the most effective intervention for overall health some subset of that population involves intervention directed at the gut microbiome, it makes no sense to insist that it must be solely addressed as a self-control problem.
You seem to be wedded to the idea of a one-size fits all solution to the extent that not only is it what you offer, but that you can't even see anyone disagreeing with you as offering anything but the same type of solution.
You seem to do this a lot, writing some pedantic elaboration on the wording of a comment while carefully ignoring the thrust of the meaning. Of course precision is useful to communication, but yeesh.
Sure, but that still doesn't justify the upthread claim "When your calories in is greater than your calories out, you gain fat."
You can maintain a calorie surplus and not gain fat, and if you are intending to gain a substantial quantity of lean body mass, you will need to. (That you can gain fat, within a certain range, while losing lean body mass on a calorie deficit was a less important aspect of my response; the key part was that the claim "moar calories => moar fat" is significantly wrong.
> You seem to do this a lot, writing some pedantic elaboration on the wording of a comment while carefully ignoring the thrust of the meaning.
The thrust of the meaning was that calorie surplus/deficit alone controls body fat. This is fundamentally and critically wrong, because it ignores the fact that activity patterns and other factors will control whether a calories surplus (for example) manifests in fat gain (with constant or decreasing muscle) or muscle gain (with constant or decreasing fat) or both muscle and fat gain in some ratio.
- Yet another step towards not having to be responsible for your own actions & choices
- Given how big of an impact agriculture has on the planet, figuring out how to allow people to eat many times more food simply for the sake of eating it seems... irresponsible to say the least. If anything we should be working in the other direction, so that people require less food.
If this environmental concern justifies compelling people who are born with unusually efficient microbiomes to not have that condition treated and corrected, despite the health benefits, does it also compel people born with normally or under efficient gut microbiomes to have that "condition" treated and corrected so that they have more environmentally-sound, hyper-efficient gut microbiomes, notwithstanding the health and weight-management challenges that will pose for them.
Are their other health conditions that people ought to leave untreated to reduce environmental footprint? I mean, certainly if we just didn't treat life-threatening conditions and let people die, we'd save both their downstream food consumption and the resources (some of which are themselves, or have as inputs, agricultural products) used in the treatments, which, if "the impact agriculture has on the planet" is sufficient to deny treatments that might increase it, ought to be a compelling concern.
(Of course, on the other hand, since part of the point of treating extra-efficient gut microbiomes is to help people lose weight, which will [by reducing maintenance needs] mitigate the agriculture impact they have from its initial peak, and reduce the energy cost of transporting them, etc. -- often born through fossil fuels, which also have a tremendous impact on the plant -- I'm not convinced that even on its own terms your criticism is all that well thought out beyond the very short-term impacts.)
Have you looked at obesity statistics? http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistic...
> More than 1 in 3 adults are considered to be obese. > More than 1 in 6 children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 are considered to be obese.
Do you mean to say that 33% of quantifiably obese adults have unusually efficient gut bacteria? These aren't strange outliers, it's one third of the adult population.
Its not implausible that a substantial share of them do; there's a lot of interesting hints in recent research suggesting that elements of modern lifestyles in the US may have substantially affected gut microbiomes over the last several generations, starting with very early life changes that affect the way they get initially established.
An important part of the obesity epidemic -- though almost certainly not its sole cause; diet and activity pattern changes with effects other than via the composition of the microbiome certainly exist -- may well be widespread disruption of normal gut microbiome.
- The microbiome is a factor, which is only in the past few years being explored.
- thyroid hormone levels are a big factor
- genetics are a factor (note that identical twins raised in different environments tend to end up more alike each other in BMI than like their siblings in the same environment)
- genetic low-response to cardio (check out the recent University of Bath study)
- viruses are a factor (AD-36 being one known one)
- percentage of BAT ("brown fat") is a factor
- systemic inflammation is a factor
etc. etc.
Simply labeling it a problem of self-control paints with far too wide (and pejorative) a brush. Let's assume a hospitalization somehow leaves you with a more efficient gut -- how easily can you stop eating, say, 250 calories a day? (Research shows: not easily, and not forever.)
I have Hashimoto's Disease, and people tell me that I should just eat less, to stop gaining weight randomly...
The problem is that I absorb calories too easily, and use them too slow, while I have problems absorbing everything else (and using everything else).
The result is that I need a very high protein and vitamin intake (medics even told me to use some supplements, for example it has been years that I am taking vitamin D in the maximum "safe" known dosage, and my blood levels are still in the "dangerously low" level) to keep my body barely working properly (Barely because I struggle to keep lean mass, not only in muscles, but also hair, nails, skin... my hair is constantly falling, nails break for no reason, and sometimes layers of my skin start to peel off).
But the amount of resources I need to keep my body working, has in themselves more calories than my body uses...
So my choices are: don't eat and get rapidly worsening health, or eat and get fat.
No, that isn't how obesity works. What you put in your face is directly responsible for how fat you become. The microbes are just a factor, they aren't the root cause.
They are convinced. And they will entertain no opposing ideas.
The "big-boned" or "genetically fat" arguments still reek of BS, but it's worth humoring the idea that we aren't 100% efficient machines that absorb the exact number of calories on the Nutrition Facts box, or burn the exact number of calories displayed on the Treadmill screen...
There's a intelligent middle-ground between equally ridiculous ideas that we are "Healthy at Every Size" and that we are perfectly tuned biological machines.
That people lose weight when they eat an energy deficiency and gain it when they eat an energy surplus is not in doubt. What some people refuse to do is evaluate whether the same foods have different energy values for different people, rather than one global value. I'm not saying they do, but the most ardent "calories in/calories out" fanatics refuse to even acknowledge the question.
That isn't to say that two identical people with two different gut floras would necessarily gain or lose weight identically while eating the same diet, but I've yet to see any evidence that an otherwise healthy person eating maintenance level calories is going to blow up like a balloon simply because his gut flora is different. A person with a healthy gut flora might be able to consume more calories without gaining as much weight, and it's important to understand WHY that is, but the fact remains that if you don't consume any more than you expend, you aren't going to gain weight (previously mentioned caveats notwithstanding).
That said, the western diet is horrible for you. Go to any fast food restaurant and the only fiber you'll get is in the lettuce on your burger.
The whole point of the article here is that there is a line of research which has established, both in non-human models and human experiments, that "maintenance level calories" (especially when considering the content of food that enters the mouth, rather than what gets absorbed) are not a constant across different gut biomes.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/94/1/58.full
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Turnbaugh/publicat...
I doubt there are people getting twice as many calories out of a meal than the average person.
To be equally pedantic, it's not what you "put in your face", but how much. Microbes are a factor in weight gain and weight loss just like diet and exercise are also factors. There is no "one simple trick" to lose weight, there are a variety of factors that, if understood, can help us understand the safest, most efficient ways to maintain a healthy weight.
Humans are just animals, and despite the illusion of will power and decisions and all that other junk, we eat as we do because 500,000 years ago our ancestors risked famine constantly.
We're optimized against lack of calories, and not optimized for excess calories at all.
What this means is that, for the vast majority of people, if you have it to put it in your face, you will, and while you can occasionally refuse this, you won't do so often enough to matter unless your a "fitness" fetishist (fit for what?).
Obesity rates in the US are pretty high.
http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistic...
> More than 2 in 3 adults are considered to be overweight or obese.
> More than 1 in 3 adults are considered to be obese.
> More than 1 in 20 adults are considered to have extreme obesity.
> About one-third of children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 are considered to be overweight or obese.
> More than 1 in 6 children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 are considered to be obese.
The vast majority of people in the world do not have access to bountiful food.
In the US, where the vast majority do have such access, an absolute majority are at least overweight, and more than a third are obese.
And 66%? That's a vast majority.