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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."
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Only eat at places run by skinny people.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Yes. http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152
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!”
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.
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
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!
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".
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.
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.
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.