If you've been reading my newsletters for a while, then you know one of
the biggest things I talk about is the importance of all those trillions
of little "critters" in your gut (your probiotics, and the balance
between good and bad bugs in your gut) that regulate so many important
aspects of your health, including your immune system, digestion, your
weight, and even brain health according to some recent studies.
After
all, as you may have heard, we have 10x the amount of microbes in our
body compared to the number of our own human cells in our body.
Clearly, those 100 trillion "bugs" in your body control a LOT about your
health considering they outnumber our own cells 10 to 1.
Well, recently I've been reading the thought-provoking new book by Michael Pollan called Cooked, and I ran across this excerpt, which is important and fascinating:
"Indeed,
the microbiota may play an important role in regulating our weight. It
has long been known that feeding antibiotics to livestock makes them
gain more weight on the same amount of feed, and though the mechanism
has not been identified, intriguing new clues are emerging. A group of
researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that the
types of bacteria dominant in the gut of obese individuals (in both mice
and humans) are very different from those found in slender people, and
that the different species of gut bacteria metabolize food more or less
efficiently.
This suggests that the amount of energy we obtain
from a given amount of food may vary depending on the kinds of microbes
living in your gut. So might changing the composition of our gut
bacteria in turn change our weight? Possibly: The researchers found
that when they transferred bacteria from the gut of fat mice into
germ-free mice, the germ-free mice gained nearly twice as much weight as
when they received gut bacteria from skinny mice. Other research has
found that specific gut microbes, such as Helicobacter pylori (which are
killed by antibiotics), play a role in regulating the hormones that
control appetite."
As you can see, the irresponsible use of
antibiotics in livestock in the last 50 years and also the
over-prescription of antibiotics in humans for every little minor
sickness has been devastating the guts of humans and possibly making us
fat just like livestock fatten up with the use of antibiotics.
This
excerpt also raises intriguing points about the importance of our gut
probiotics in regulating our weight considering the information about
different gut microbes in obese vs slender people.
Check out this
video below for some more shocking info on whether YOUR gut microbes
are out of balance and making you gain weight, as well as digestion and
immune problems:
Is YOUR gut overloaded with toxic gut microbes crowding out the good probiotics? (important stuff)
PS -- if you liked today's article, please fwd this email on to any of your friends, family, or co-workers that would enjoy it.
Mike Geary
Certified Nutrition Specialist
Certified Personal Trainer