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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."
Now you have me wondering if we can make dumb people smart, and mean people nice. We may achieve world peace through fecal transplants.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I know its a joke, but not really. At the end of the day, humans are just fairly complicated machines, or even just a big complex chemical reaction.
Pretty much everything we do comes from either training/uprising, or from some biological system or another. As time goes, we'll figure out all of the later...and statistics will take care of the former.
Will be a very boring world probably, but...
Exactly what it sounds like.
Humans have gut bacteria. These bacteria are required for the gut to function properly. In some cases a person can lose theirs following a course of really powerful antibiotics - they'll kill whatever's causing their disease, but kill all the required bacteria in their gut too. This is a bad thing: Gut without bacteria doesn't work very well and, though it's not fatal, is going to leave the patient suffering a number of unpleasant conditions. The solution is very simple though. Just take someone with a healthy bacterial ecosystem in their gut, extract a handy lump of bacteria, insert it into the unhealthy patient. The ready-made bacterial colony then takes hold there and returns things to a healthy balance. It sounds disgusting and, well, it is. But it works.
Figure out which bacteria the obese patients have in common
They've done some perliminary studies, and one major difference is the proportion of Firmicutes to Bacteroides. Fewer Bacteroides and more Firmicutes are correlated with being obese. Those are borad classes, though, and not particular strains, and it's not clear if it's the presense of Firmicutes, or the abscence of Bacteroides which is related to obesity.
Bacteroides likes to eat complex polysaccharides, like those found in many plants, so it's speculated (but not known) that a diet high in plant polysaccharides would promote the presence of Bacteroides, and correspondingly reduce the number of Firmicutes
More evidence to support my hypothesis that gut flora plays games with us. All it takes is one bacteria secreting a chemical that makes us feel like crap if we don't eat the sugars or whatever it craves and secreting something else that makes us feel good when we do.
Maybe resisting that sick feeling and staying on course means the rogue organism will starve to death?
There are gut flora organisms which can't be cultured outside the gut, or even outside certain portions of the gut. We don't know what a lot of them do, but there are something like 2kg (~4lb) of them in each of us. Being quite small, each of us is vastly outnumbered on the scale that war against these beasts is basically genocide (How To Make A Vegan Explode -101).
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
There have been studies showing a link between heavy antibiotic use in children under the age of 3 and regressive autism, caused by a commonly occurring antibacterial-resistant bacteria (Clostridia) proliferating in the absence of competition, which produces a neurotoxin as a waste byproduct (Propionic Acid)
This is why I find the anti-vaxxers so ironic. They ALMOST figured it out, but started blaming vaccines instead of antibiotics.
The whole point is many skinny people violate this law but do not get obese.
I do and the way I eat absolutely upsets a few larger people I know.
burgers, doughnuts, eating out a lot, snacking all the time, yet I'm a solid 155lbs at 5'11 with a desk job as a software developer sitting all day. Nothing I do changes my weight and I'm a very small framed athletic looking individual who takes about 2 shits a day if it matters to anyone.
I also drink loads of coffee and soda, then sit around idle and program.
So the law is kinda bullshit for some of us.... This whole bacteria talk is about trying to bestow traits like mine unto people who can't lose weight without literally starving it out of them with your "law".
Funny that this law doesn't apply to everyone. I know a guy who literally doesn't eat. He inhales. I actually doubt that he chews. As for "exercise", there's very little outside the area of mouse clicking and occasional trips to the fridge to get a new soda.
One should assume that he's a lardball. He isn't. Quite the opposite.
There is nearly certainly some other reason behind some people's weight that cannot be explained with "too much food and too little exercise" alone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Figure out what to cut out of that. If I could figure out a way of inverting it and eat the big meal in the morning I might be better off but the timing sucks.
Easy. The carbs.
Toast = carbs. Milk = carbs. Snack bar = carbs. Yogurt = carbs. For two meals every day, your protein to carbs ratio sucks. Eat 125g of carbs per day or less. Count it out. Then, eat as much protein and vegetables as you like. Meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, carrots, celery, pickles, etc.
Here's what I ate on my way to losing 70 pounds in 9 months:
Breakfast: Bacon, eggs fried in butter, hot or iced tea. Limit myself to one slice of toast, one piece of fruit or a half cup of juice (about 4 ounces), if at all
Lunch: This is where I eat most of my carbs. As a programmer, I must have one Coke (40g carbs) in the middle of the day to function properly. Beyond that I would eat something with only about 30g-40g of carbs.
Dinner. Again, eat about 30-40g of carbs max, depending on what I ate the rest of the day. If I need to snack after dinner, it's meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, carrots, celery, pickles, etc.
The weight dropped off effortlessly, despite me eating as much as I wanted. The problem is that our modern society has shifted food to where our balance is completely off compared to how we were designed.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
We've established that psychopaths are far more successful in modern society, so obviously the first thing anyone who wants the best for their children should do is have them engineered for psychopathy. Empathy is for the weak
No, game theory tells us that sociopaths do well in a society that is primarily composed of non-sociopaths, but do not do so well in a society where they are the majority (and that society also doesn't do well as a whole).
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The child's intestine gets colonized during childbirth. That's been discovered to be one of the problems with Caesarian section, in fact. The baby's large intestine doesn't get the proper bacterial colonization.
This is what I tell my colleagues, who notice that I never really get sick. If you didn't grow up in the country eating dirt, head out to a mall and find an escalator. Put your tongue on the railing and wait for it to go all the way around. If you don't die, you'll find yourself with a nice healthy immune system and excellent gut flora.
So far nobody has taken me up on it.
You've clearly never been at the birth of a child* :)
We have a five month old and the birth is still a surprisingly vivid memory for me. The one thing child birth is not, is clean. There is rather a lot of everything, everywhere.
There is a lot of transfer of bodily substances of all types during a normal birth, including bacteria from the mum's gut. It's a known issue for babies born by c-section who don't get closely acquainted with their mother's backside. From what I've been told in anti-natal classes even back-to-back babies (those who come out head first but facing the front, ideal is rear facing) get a reduced exposure.
It takes several days for a babies digestive system to kick into gear, during which time those bacteria are colonising the gut, skin and everything else on the body. C-section babies still get those bacteria from skin to skin transfer, but it takes longer to build up and they may not get the full set.
* Other than your own of course...
There is something to what you say. My own experience was that once the gut flora got out of balance, yeast took over.
During those few years of yeast overgrowth I developed very weird craving for sugars were often I won't be able to go to sleep [and shake like I am dying of starvation] if I did not eat sweet. Once the problem was identified I was put on no sugar at all diet. It took some discipline in the beginning, but to my delight once the yeast began dying [regular lab tests showed that] this maniacal cravings just disappeared and did not come back [1 year so far].
So there is something about this. The guys in our intestines seem to have profound effect on many, many things in our physiological and psychological health.
Tully, the old saying "tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are" seems to be spot on. During one of my doctor's visit I quoted the fad line "Well, those guys are sometimes called the second genome, right?"
To which the doctor banged with her fist on the table and said "No, they are the first genome! They got more genes than us, their network of biofilm comprises an actual organ [without which we will be dead] , making it the largest organ in the body, 60% of your immune system happens in the intestine. Those guys can make us sick, the can cure us, they can make us crazy. And they were doing that job well before Homo Sapiens came to be. They are the first!"