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Woman Suffers Significant Weight Gain After Fecal Transplant

Posted by timothy on from the watch-the-upstream dept.

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."

59 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  2. Okay, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Figure out which bacteria the obese patients have in common that the thin ones don't, and figure out a way to eliminate it.

    1. Re:Okay, so... by Megane · · Score: 4, Informative

      Fecal transplants from thin people to fat people causing weight loss is actually a thing. What I hadn't heard of before is the reverse, but I am certainly not surprised.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    2. Re:Okay, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

    3. Re:Okay, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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".

    4. Re:Okay, so... by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    5. Re:Okay, so... by PRMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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...
    6. Re: Okay, so... by smaddox · · Score: 2

      If he's drinking multiple non-diet sodas a day, he's practically guaranteed to be above a 2000 cal diet.

      This article is not science. A single uncontrolled data point is far from convincing. There appears to be some legitimate evidence from studies in mice that gut bacteria transplants can have an significant effect on weight (on phone so no ref), but it's not definitively proven.

      This particular case could be explained in a thousand other ways.

    7. Re:Okay, so... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

      Here's what I ate on my way to losing 70 pounds in 9 months:

      Losing 70 lbs in 9 months is not hard. The important question is: How much did you weigh five years later?

    8. Re: Okay, so... by sonicmerlin · · Score: 2

      It's called a case study. It is in fact science. It doesn't "prove" anything but illuminates possibilities for further research.

    9. Re:Okay, so... by DexterIsADog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The whole point is many skinny people violate this law but do not get obese.

      No, they don't. If they did somehow take in more calories then they put out without gaining weight they would be destroying matter and energy, which is physically impossible in our universe. Our bodies are not some magical boxes where the laws of physics suddenly stop applying.

      Um, no, you're wrong. One possibility is that their bodies excrete a higher percentage of the food they take in without metabolizing it. No magic involved.

      I think you have a too simplistic view of human bodies. They are not machines that perfectly process whatever is put into them.

    10. Re:Okay, so... by wiredlogic · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

      What would be more interesting is if these bacteria actually influenced their host's behavior to drive more consumption of sugars. I'm skinny and have never had a strong desire to consume sweets. The majority of the overweight population who can't naturally control their consumption of high-energy foods seem alien and puzzling to me.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    11. Re:Okay, so... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      Actually, it does not.

      The problem your parent points out is only *one* of the options. The more general situation is that some humans, most of them obese, harbour gut bacterias similar to cows.

      Hence they break up fibers, and salat and vegetables are very rich on fibers in relation to their carb level.

      In other word they have more than 2x the kcals than rated on the label or in a diet book, if you have thise bacteria.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    12. Re:Okay, so... by itzly · · Score: 2

      Between 0% and 100% is enough variation left. Even a 5% difference on a 2500 kcal diet equals 15 pounds of fat after a year.

    13. Re:Okay, so... by TheNarrator · · Score: 3, Informative

      Good find! Here's an interesting study on how over-activation of Toll-Like Receptor 5 by certain bacteria was highly correlated with obesity:

      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

    14. Re:Okay, so... by Evtim · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!"

  3. Choose your food handlers wisely by NotQuiteReal · · Score: 5, Funny

    Only eat at places run by skinny people.

    --
    This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
    1. Re:Choose your food handlers wisely by MTEK · · Score: 3, Funny

      And only those who could give a shit.

  4. Have I lost my mind? by kencurry · · Score: 2

    What in the name of god is a fecal transplant?

    --
    sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
    1. Re:Have I lost my mind? by Shados · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Have I lost my mind? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Have I lost my mind? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!
    4. Re:Have I lost my mind? by trout007 · · Score: 2

      That's not quite accurate. Those bacteria are all around us and especially on the food you eat. It may take a while for those bacteria to increase enough in population so to speed things up you inoculate your system.

      The same thing can happen with bread,beer or wine. You can go ahead and wait for the natural yeast to take over or you can take a vial of ready to go yeast and pitch it in to get things started right away.

      I know this personally because when I met my wife her family ate beans quite often. I was very gassy for a couple of months until the bacteria that digested the beans got to the point they could digest it all.

      --
      I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
    5. Re:Have I lost my mind? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      The same thing can happen with bread,beer or wine. You can go ahead and wait for the natural yeast to take over or you can take a vial of ready to go yeast and pitch it in to get things started right away.

      The same thing that can happen with bread, beer, or wine can happen in your body, too: the wrong (undesirable) flora take root before the stuff that you want, and it outcompetes the desirable organisms and then you suffer. Or in the case of beer, you get nasty beer. It may still be alcoholic, but it will probably be gross.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:Have I lost my mind? by TubeSteak · · Score: 2

      3) is easy to make (see above, do not try this at home, professional driver on closed course and all that)

      Actually, people are doing it at home.

      It's a SFW thing to search for, as long as you get your search terms right.
      "diy" or "home" and "fecal transplant"

      There's really no difference between what you can do at home and what a doctor can do for you, other than ordering up disease and parasite screening tests for your donor.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    7. Re:Have I lost my mind? by dotancohen · · Score: 2

      ...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...

      Where do babies get them from? Surely there is no interintestinal transfer from mom to womb.

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    8. Re:Have I lost my mind? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Where do babies get them from? Surely there is no interintestinal transfer from mom to womb.

      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.

    9. Re:Have I lost my mind? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    10. Re:Have I lost my mind? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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...

  5. Re:what about skinny people? by marked23 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes. http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152

  6. Maybe just not being ill by cpuffer_hammer · · Score: 2

    Being ill takes a lot of energy, being healthy again but still eating and exorsizing to the same level could result weight gain.
    I would think a search though the data should start to answer this question. Or relationship with our gutflora is more complex than can be summed up. There may be lots of changes in peoples that could be made this way. More collecting of before and after facts (even things like concentration, strangth, dexterity) should be considered.

    1. Re:Maybe just not being ill by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you watch "My 600 lb Life" on Discovery...

      ...then you will see exactly what the producers of "My 600 lb Life" want you to see, which is a tiny sliver of the truth that has been carefully selected, edited, and re-contextualized to tell you what they know you want to hear.

      Reality TV - isn't.

  7. Re:what about skinny people? by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!”
  8. Intestinal infection, don't jump to conclusions. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    She wasn't overweight when she had a persistent intestinal infection and gained weight after it was cured. She might well be eating more simply because it doesn't cause her discomfort anymore, or her body uses fewer resources because it doesn't have to fight an infection, or her colon has become better at absorbing the nutrients in her food because it's no longer infected.

    Worth looking into, but if your conclusion is that the bacterial composition in the colon makes people fat, you're getting ahead of yourself.

  9. Re:what about skinny people? by Shados · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  10. Cordyceps controls bug brains to propagate... by Pezbian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  11. Re:what about skinny people? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 4, Funny

    So that's the definition of 'humanitarian.' I always wondered about that.

  12. Re:what about skinny people? by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Informative

    If a fat person eats skinny people shit will they lose weight??

    I don't know about that one, but having worms in your intestine can make you lose weight for sure.

    See picture. It's just like a big bowl of yummy pasta!

  13. Doubtful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The presence of gut bacteria with such high efficiency (they ones that make you fat by being too good at their job) won't be counter-acted by the presence of the less efficient variety.

    What this means, though, is that I can no longer feel the familiar sense of derision for fat people. Their obesity really may be a product of their microecology, rather than their laziness and hedonistic eating habits. Now I have to feel pity for them instead.

    I guess I can still feel superior to them, since I still am physically fit compared to them...I just can't feel like this was the result of superior decisions any more.

    Oh well, there are plenty of other ways to save my fragile ego.

    1. Re:Doubtful by sonicmerlin · · Score: 4, Informative

      Did you even bother to read the article? The woman's eating habits and calorie intake were carefully measured and she gained weight despite not changing anything. I've lost 35 lbs with exercise, but despite spending almost 100 minutes and 1100 calories a day, I still can't get rid of the last 5-10 lbs of flab. It doesn't matter how little I eat.

    2. Re:Doubtful by Cinnamon+Beige · · Score: 4, Informative

      That only applies when you're dealing with basically an ISO Standard nutrient processing system on a lab-made nutrient slurry--basically, lab mice on lab block.

      Basically, gut bacteria are actually a pretty essential part of processing nutrients, and in some cases the actual source of much of them. Certain types of problems basically will leave you incapable of properly processing parts--for example, with my aunt certain kinds of foods are now pretty much processed directly into fats, and the body is quite capable of taking part of those 3000 Calories' worth of warm-blooded flesh and using that to sustain it when the 2000 Calories of the food intake is being mostly stored. (And yes, the capitalization matters: nutrition uses the kilocalorie, actually, and in a confusing fit of non-standard metric renders it Calorie instead. Either way, the amount of error due to rounding introduced into the values is left as an exercise for the reader.)

      This can, however, be caused by things like a food intolerance or a metabolic dysfunction, and one of the basic tests to see if the person's obesity is a symptom is to, well, cut the caloric intake while maintaining the same levels of activity and see if weight loss happens. The wide range of things it's a symptom of--from things as amazingly cheap & easy to treat such as thyroid disease to those essential to catch early like cancer--are such that failing to check the cause is like...well...failing to check to see if the computer's problem is that it's not turned on.

    3. Re:Doubtful by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually that has nothing to do with the laws of thermodynamics. (Hint: read them. You figure they are easy to understand and focus around heat engines, notable about the relation between volume, temperature and pressure of gases)

      Secondly, if you had read the article, which you did mot have obviously, you had noticed that the 'victim' here has the 'wrong' gut bacterias. What is 2000kcal on paper, according to nutrition tables, is 3000 - 3200kcal for her (that is not in the paper, that is my estimate) Read my other post a few pages up, which explains it in more details.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    4. Re:Doubtful by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      1. People are animals.

      Transplanting fat-rat microbes into skinny rats resulted in the skinny rats turning fat. The science behind it really isn't hard to understand: different animals have different microbe cultures in their guts, which process foods differently. So what on earth would make you think that this couldn't possibly happen with people, and that it's perfectly safe to transplant fat-person microbes into a skinny person?

      2. Well it obviously did work here: the skinny person got fat thanks to the transplant from the fat person. Good job!

      Besides, people do all kinds of crazy and dangerous stuff to try to lose weight now, including a) liposuction and b) stomach stapling. Why the hell would you not try FMT instead, which seems far less invasive and risky than cutting someone open for surgery? Hmmm... which should I try first, taking some antibiotics and then swallowing a pill with someone's fecal matter to repopulate my intestines with better bacteria, or being put under general anaesthesia and having holes cut in me and a suction tube stuck in to suck the fat out? Or better yet being cut open and having my stomach modified so I can barely eat any food at all?

  14. Re:what about skinny people? by Immerman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why boring? 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. Should make things *extremely* interesting...

    --
    --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  15. Re:Causation of other things? by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 2

    Yup, same here. After my wisdom tooth removal, I was prescribed Dalacin. I got a nice case of pseudomembranous colitis which sent me to the ER, with acute pain like being stabbed in the gut.

    After being fixed with several IV courses of penicillin, I was "cured", but since then I have many IBS-type symptoms and have had to make a list of items I must avoid eating.

    I'm fatter and depressed now.

    --
    Mostly random stuff.
  16. Re:Causation of other things? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You do realize that there 'have been studies' that show a link from pretty much anything to anything else. These sorts of studies are quick, easy and quite often, completely wrong when attempts are made to determine causality. They're like bible quotations. They can say anything you want them to say.

    Statistics is hard.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  17. Re:what about skinny people? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  18. actual study by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a link to the actual study.

    In brief:
    Woman weighed 136 pounds, daughter weight 140 pounds. After transplant from daughter to woman, she didn't return for 16 months (according to my reading of the article). The woman had gained up to 177 pounds, while the daughter gained up to 170 pounds.

    So this is more a case report than an study. Journals are used for communication between professionals. This doctor is saying, "hey, something weird happened.....it might be a coincidence (there is a lot wrong with this woman), but keep an eye out for anything similar."

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  19. Re:what about skinny people? by Ambvai · · Score: 2

    ...Well, I'm not eating for the rest of the day.

    Here's the Youtube video from which that image is from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  20. Or our calorie measurement methods need updating by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  21. Re:Intestinal infection, don't jump to conclusions by Solandri · · Score: 2

    She wasn't overweight when she had a persistent intestinal infection and gained weight after it was cured. She might well be eating more simply because it doesn't cause her discomfort anymore, or her body uses fewer resources because it doesn't have to fight an infection, or her colon has become better at absorbing the nutrients in her food because it's no longer infected.

    Actually, according to TFA, she was overweight prior to the treatment, with a BMI of 26 (which is borderline overweight). So yeah, I think your explanation is probably the likely one.

  22. Re:what about skinny people? by whoever57 · · Score: 3

    Can you name a single primarily psychopathic society to provide even anecdotal experimental evidence for your claim? Theory is nice and all, but is notoriously inapplicable to human behavior.

    That's the point, isn't it? There are no primarily psychopathic societies because they are unsuccessful -- they die out too quickly to create records.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  23. Re:what about skinny people? by bytesex · · Score: 2

    It's correlated with *increased* curiosity. Hence the loss of fear.

    --
    Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
  24. Re:what about skinny people? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    >It's just like a big bowel of yummy pasta.

    There, fixed it for ya.

  25. Could be worse... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

    ... the Macrobiome in her Gut Fauna could have been out of whack.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  26. Re:what about skinny people? by toonces33 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I am not going to take any shit from you.

  27. Re:what about skinny people? by Bill+Dog · · Score: 2

    Even if it's delivered to your location via... stool pigeon?

    --
    Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
  28. Re:what about skinny people? by Smallpond · · Score: 2

    Probably referring to the Prisoner's Dilemma which is a payoff matrix that results in trusting players doing better than rational players.

  29. Re:what about skinny people? by dreddnott · · Score: 2

    Free will is an illusion and the 'ability to choose' is a legal and social construct. You are wrong.

    --
    I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.