The more I read about the bacteria in our intestines, the more fascinating it becomes:
Taking the right mix of bacteria could lead to a form of “knifeless gastric bypass,” a surgery-free method of causing the kind of significant weight loss associated with procedures that reduce the size of the stomach. According to New Scientist magazine, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have been able to induce weight loss in normal mice by introducing gut bacteria from mice who had undergone gastric bypass. The findings could lead to a similar treatment program for human obesity.
Gastric bypass surgeries have proven to be a highly successful method of treating obesity and associated diseases like type 2 diabetes. Patients who have the procedure often lose from 65 to 75 percent of their body weight. However, the procedure also comes with a high risk of fatality, particularly in patients who are severely obese.
The Massachusetts team, led by Lee Kaplan, performed gastric bypass surgeries on mice, then fed bacteria from those mice’s lower intestines to ordinary mice. Those mice lost 5 percent of their body weight over the next two weeks as compared to mice on the same diet who did not receive the bacteria.
This also leads me to wonder about the connection between antibiotics and weight gain, since that’s the reason they’re given to animals.
I have a vague memory of gut bacteria and even some other gut flora and fauna which greatly affect over all health. I think I heard something on NPR maybe about some thing which have disappeared from the guts of people living in more anteseptic conditions, such as many of our Western societies, leading to other, more serius ailments.
But I can’t recall quite what to google for….