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Study: Body Weight Heavily Influenced By Heritable Gut Microbes
FirephoxRising writes Our genetic makeup influences whether we are fat or thin by shaping which types of microbes thrive in our body, according to a new study. Scientists identified a specific, little known bacterial family that is highly heritable and more common in individuals with low body weight. So we are what we eat, and what we got from out parents. From the article: "The study, funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers sequenced the genes of microbes found in more than 1,000 fecal samples from 416 pairs of twins. The abundances of specific types of microbes were found to be more similar in identical twins, who share 100 per cent of their genes, than in non-identical twins, who share on average only half of the genes that vary between people. These findings demonstrate that genes influence the composition of gut microbes."
Here we go, endless posts about how it's all down to pure willpower and entirely the fault of the individual. Maybe we could try looking for more practical solutions and simply berating people this time?
We could look at the first law of thermodynamics.
Physics don't apply to the fatlogic crowd of SJWs.
The microbs thrive in different environments. I went from a standard american diet to something more high fat low simple carbs diet with lots of fermented foods. Not only did I lose a bunch of weight but most digestive, allergy, and skin problems went away as well. I think there was something about the microbial environment that a high sugar diet caused that was giving me trouble.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Reducing intake will reduce weight regardless of state of your gut. Microbes don't generate energy out of nothing.
This is a story about the fact that microbiome of the gut is being widely recognised as essentially another organ of the body, and differences in microbiome can affect things like how well your gut absorbs energy and so on. However reducing intake will cause weight loss regardless of it. The only question is, "how much of a weight loss per reduced intake".
Thank you for making a pointless analogy.
There's actually been serious study of this, and it really is tied to potential for weight gain/loss. Here's one recent summary: Energy-balance studies reveal associations between gut microbes, caloric load, and nutrient absorption in humans.
But some people stay thin much longer, their microbes cause the food to be turned into fat much less.
Also it's not so simple as "just eat less", the body has a concept of what your 'normal' weight is. If you lose some the chemical processes will change to make more fat and compensate for the weight loss. It probably takes about 6 months of holding an amount of weight before this concept changes.
Eventually being fat is a combination of many factors, several of which you do have control over.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Both identical and non-identical twins (typically) grow up sharing a household. The most obvious relevant thing different about them is their genome. Yes, it's possible there's some other effect, but both types of twins grow up in the same households exposed to the same foods. So the fact that significant differences are observed between identical and non-identical twins suggest that genetics is at play.
At the calorie level they are EXACTLY identical. Those foods are only different in the WAY they are turned in to calories. A Calorie is just a measure of energy.
You're fat because you eat more calories than you burn plain and simple.
That's a stupid thing to say right on the face of it, mostly because it just isn't true. Hmm, actually, completely because it isn't true. At all. First, the "caloric content" of foods is based on the amount of energy you get back when you set them on fire. Your body does not contain tiny furnaces into which magical goblins heave small pieces of the food you've eaten. The process for getting energy out of food may sound like that when mitochondria is described, but there's a number of steps between mastication and elimination which affect the amount of nutrition you derive from what you take in.
What this research demonstrates, in fact, is that two people eating the same food will have different results in the area of nutritive uptake due to their intestinal environment. It proves, in fact, the exact opposite of what you're saying. But since you were saying something we already knew to be false, it did not bear saying at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To a certain extent, that's meaningless. Those calories are bound up in a way that you can't use them--which is why they're waste). It may be that there are some usable calories in there if you went back and ingested them again, but obviously there are significantly diminishing returns.
There are a certain number of calories per gram of food. Your body is capable of removing and using somewhere between 0-100% of those calories. Your gut flora pushes you in one direction or another--at the highest end, you can capture nearly 100% of the available food energy from your meals. No matter what, you cannot gain more than 1g of weight from 1g of food. Physics and chemistry being what it is, you probably won't, though.
In the end, there are two things that people need to know if they want to control their weight: how much they're eating, and how much they're burning. Those are the only things you can meaningfully control (there is some evidence that changing your diet significantly can affect the microbiome--it seems pretty imprecise right now). If your gut microbiome is super efficient, you'll need to find ways to eat that don't leave you hungry but also don't give you too many calories.
The first few weeks of any training program typically suck. That's where willpower (or encouragement if you're in a group) plays such an important role.
Once I'm passed the initial hump, I always feel the "addictive" need to get more exercise and chase the high. In my specific case, the "high" comes after sustained exertion in the med/high effort range. I rarely see it biking (I'm a bike commuter and never really push myself). But running, climbing, mountaineering, and snowboarding all bring it out. For running, on long runs at a moderate pace it kicks in around mile 5 or 6. For short, faster runs, it kicks in about 30 minutes after the run and lasts for a few hours. Other sports have similar patterns. In my experience, the feeling is most similar to hydrocodone (which, unfortunately, I also know about from running).
Wikipedia's description of the "runner's high" covers some of the suspected mechanisms for it.
-Chris
Nope.
Food calories are measured by burning the food with O2 in a calorimeter.
Anyone who things that metabolism works the same way is an idiot. You have to take into account the efficiency of the various metabolic proceses, how much energy it takes to digest the food in the first place, what portion remains undigested, etc, etc.