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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."

25 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 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.

    5. 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.
  4. 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!”
  5. 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.

  6. 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...

  7. 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.

  8. 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.
  9. Re:what about skinny people? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  10. 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!
  11. 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!

  12. 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.
  13. 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
  14. 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."
  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. Re:what about skinny people? by toonces33 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I am not going to take any shit from you.