Word: weightfulness
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...hardly a secret that men and women gain weight, lose weight and think about weight entirely differently. It's also not news that body-fat percentage alone - with females naturally carrying an extra ladling of adipose tissue - gives males a head start in the slimming game. But a new study from Brookhaven National Laboratory looked deeper into the primal ways in which we react to the very presence of food - and if you like to eat, this is not a study you would have wanted any part of. (See the Year in Medicine...
...Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, the University of Arizona and the Mayo Clinic in Arizona report a very small study of nine individuals - three of normal weight, three who were morbidly obese and three who underwent gastric-bypass surgery. The team found that each group harbored a different intestinal zoo of microbes and that following their surgery, the gastric-bypass patients' gut bugs ended up looking much more similar to those of the normal-weight patients. (See the Year in Health, from...
...these results are only preliminary, they do point to an entirely new way that doctors and patients might be able to tackle the growing obesity epidemic in the U.S. "This study suggests that the differences in the organisms may play at least some role in why people lose the weight they do," says Dr. John DiBaise, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic and one of the study's authors. "Ultimately, we may not only be able to manipulate the microbes of obese individuals to look like those of normal-weight people, but we might also potentially be able to predict...
...each person's ability to extract energy and store fat from food changes depending on which combination of bugs are living in the gut. Those who are morbidly obese, it seems, tend to nurture bugs that promote the fat-storage process, which might be a factor in their excessive weight gain. The bypass patients appeared to follow a similar pattern but in the opposite direction, eating less first and then developing bugs appropriate to that diet. It's not clear how the physical act of reducing food intake drives that change, nor how long-lasting the possible slimming effects...
...none of this means that downing the latest probiotic yogurts, which contain certain strains of good gut bacteria, should be the next weight-loss craze. For one thing, says DiBaise, the strains that were dominant in the normal-weight people are not the same as those promoted in the popular probiotic yogurts. Second, there is no evidence that probiotic products can do anything about weight loss; the latest scientific studies have shown only that probiotics can relieve antibiotic-related diarrhea, as well as alleviate IBS and aide regularity. "It is interesting to look at microbial flora," says Lynne McFarland...