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Woman Suffers Significant Weight Gain After Fecal Transplant
Beeftopia (1846720) writes In a case reported in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman suffering from a drug-resistant intestinal infection gained 36 pounds after receiving a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter. Previous mouse studies have shown thin mice gain weight after ingesting fecal bacteria from obese mice. The woman previously was not overweight. After the procedure, despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen, the woman remained obese. Her doctor said, "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain... She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems... as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people."
Yes. http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152
When something happens and your guts flora goes out of wack, because of a previous illness, some surgery, whatever, your digestive system suffers quite a bit, and has no way to recover (those bacterias don't come out of nowhere...if 100% of them are gone, they're not coming back...).
So the only way to get them back is to transplant bacterias from someone else, to "bootstrap" your system anew. And the easiest way to get a bunch of those bacterias is in, well...yanno...
So they either take a piece and stick it in you, or they make a pill out of a little bit of it. Gross as hell, but less gross than dealing with a fucked up guts flora.
It doesn't have to be all that bad. You freeze dry the feces (that can't be fun). The smelly parts go up the evaporator, mostly. Some protocols spin out the debris (yesterdays burrito bits) leaving you with some flotsam that should be mostly bacteria. You put that in an enteric coated pill (so the stomach acid doesn't clobber everything) or you shove it up the butt using one of a number of techniques (insert, so to speak, favorite joke here).
Wait a bit and see what happens.
This is a very trendy field since 1) it clearly works for a defined illness (Clostridium difficele infections) 2) has an interesting and biologically plausible mechanism(s) 3) is easy to make (see above, do not try this at home, professional driver on closed course and all that) and has virtually limitless advertising possibilities. Even aside from the Holy Grail of weight loss and 4) should be able to keep Jon Stewart, 4chan and the rest of the planet in bad jokes for quite some time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You may find this article informative.
Calorie measurements of food are just estimates, the particulars vary. The gut bacteria of fat people absorb more of the available energy than that of skinny people, but our measurements of the calories in food aren't necessarily the max amount that could be absorbed.
To put it simply, fat people get more calories from the same food than skinny people, regardless of how many calories the label says the food has.