Are germs making you fat?
If it isn’t enough that germs make you sick they can also add inches to your waist line. All the more reason to make sure your home and work place remain a germ free zone.
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Hungry? It could be the bugs in your stomach that are causing your cravings. Scientists have found that some gut bacteria can increase appetite and alter metabolism, resulting in weight gain, high blood sugar and insulin resistance.
The findings, from a study of mice, support an emerging view that the obesity epidemic cannot be blamed solely on sedentary lifestyle and easy access to cheap, high-calorie food.
Andrew Gewirtz, of Emory University in Atlanta, said environmental factors other than bad eating habits could influence over-consumption of food and diet-related disease.
“Our results suggest that intestinal bacteria contribute to changes in appetite and metabolism,” he said.
His team studied mice that lack an immune system gene that controls bacteria in the intestine. These mice were about 20 per cent heavier than normal, ate more and had high cholesterol and blood pressure. When fed a high-fat diet, they gained more weight than the other mice and developed diabetes.
But their health improved after they were given antibiotics that killed their gut microbes.
An analysis of their gut bacteria showed they had different species to normal mice. The researchers transferred gut bacteria from the fat mice to mice that lacked microbes but were otherwise normal.
In results published in the journal Science, they found the recipient mice became obese and developed many of the same symptoms of metabolic syndrome – which increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease – as the fat donors, including increased appetite, high blood sugar and insulin resistance.
Humans are thought to get most of their gut bacteria early in life from family members. Dr Gewirtz said this suggested it might be possible to “inherit” a propensity for these disorders as a child through the kind of bacteria established in the gut.
Other studies have shown that, compared with thin people, obese people have more of one family of gut microbes that could make them more efficient at extracting energy from food.
Ian Caterson, the professor of human nutrition at the University of Sydney, said the research on mice demonstrated that more studies were needed.
The notion that gut bacteria affected obesity had been considered far-fetched until recently. “Now it’s the hot topic in this area,” he said.
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