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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> There have been studies that show stool transplants can suddenly cause massive weight changes in individuals.

Which is weird, because:

> "The researchers found the strongest links with visceral fat, participants with a high diversity of bacteria in their faeces had lower levels of visceral fat."

A stool sample decreasing biodiversity sounds counter-intuitive to me

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The "massive weight changes" from stool transplants are most often weight loss, to my knowledge.

If so, this would be consistent with increased biodiversity (from the stool transplant) correlating with reduced visceral fat.

At any rate, the interaction is probably more complex than our current understanding, as this is a very new area of research.

It works both ways, but once people doing FMT realized that transplanting feces from an obese person to a thin person makes the thin person gain weight, they stopped doing that. All of the stool banks now screen for obesity and won't accept donors with high BMI. So now you should only see weight loss after FMT, or no significant change.

That is very interesting.

Can you provide any links for this FMT screening process?

Sure, here's one: http://www.openbiome.org/stool-donation/

$40 per stool. Nice.

The 'bad' bacteria compete for resources with the 'good' bacteria and simply dominate them to starvation to a point of insignificance. All that's needed is a stool sample with a quorum.

The host's flora is wiped out with antibiotics before the transpant occurs.

Also, diversity has "the strongest links with visceral fat", it isn't the only parameter linked with obesity (visceral or not).

If a new bacteria can out compete the others out of existence, then it makes sense.

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