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Sewage Bacteria Reveal Cities' Obesity Rates
benonemusic writes A new frontier in data mining: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts surveyed bacteria from human waste in the municipal sewage systems. Surprisingly they found different proportions of bacterial species in cities that correlated with obesity rates in those municipal areas. The researchers believe that these bacterial samples can yield city-level information on other diseases as well. Hopefully this isn't just a messy case of spurious correlation.
Cool, I got modded troll for speaking the truth. Hell, in high school, two brothers- the fat one ate almost exactly half of what the thin one ate. In his 20s, the thinner brother finally had to start paying attention to what he ate (not literally "twice what a normal person would think a meal is"), but he's definitely not fat to this day. The fat one did weight watchers and other shenanigans, and still struggles to have a reasonably body to this day. Yes, he was eating "more than he needed", but you fucking know what? He's essentially been hungry his whole life, and the "amount of food his body needs" is QUITE clearly an amount that he ends up in constant hunger over.
That's the important part about all this. Did you know that the blood of two normal weight men, one who lost weight YEARS ago, and one who never had any tendency towards fatness, have vastly different levels of the hormones linked to satiety and hunger?
Yes, of course you can lose weight by eating less than your body needs to maintain its current weight. But that's never NOT been the case, and "starve yourself thin" is not why thin people are thin. They aren't starving. That's the point. There's very clearly triggers. Assclowns can mod me -1 all they like- it's very clearly the truth.
What about the study where they tried to get inmates to gain weight by overeating, and none could? If you think it's as simple as food consumed, you're willfully blind to reality (presumably, a reality which benefits you in some way, or at least you believe that to be the case).
major co-incidence today as my PBS station was putting on it's fundraiser series of every diet plan guy in the world. So much fluff to info, but one person was arguing this same viewpoint (gut biota and tendency to be obese) and showed a startling pair of maps - one with the level of antibiotic prescription and the other with the level of obesity. Startling overlap. Google "antibiotic obesity map" Theory being that the use of antibiotics disturbs the balance or microbes and set more of the population up for obesity. Since the idea is that different bacteria feed on different foods this comes back to skipping refined cards and sugars and eating more vegetables - basically the same kind of prescription they all end up with - and trying to skew the population faster with probiotics. On thing I do now is that every thin person out there is not a paragon of good eating and exercise and not every fat person is a pig with their head in the trough. I was never a skinny person but got progressively more massive with age until one doctor finally thought to test my thyroid which was pretty much crapped out. On the synthetic stuff now and slowly morphing back to - well, something thinner.
The opposite has also been observed (http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152). As someone who is married to someone who has struggled with her weight for all her life, and has done everything including a strict 1000 calorie diet with very little results, I KNOW there is more to it than "just don't eat as much". The people that don't have the issue or haven't lived with it don't understand the issue, and assume that "it is their fault".
TFA says "the microbiome can influence, and be influenced by, a range of characteristics such as weight, disease, diet, exercise, mood and much more." So they acknowledge the causation can go both ways.
But it gets even more interesting. According to a Ted talk I saw about this the other day, there are apparently two different ways that our gut microbes might cause obesity. One is related to what you said:
Which gets to part 2 of the problem: We shit stuff that is still quite nutritious. Ask your local fly population. Our "waste" is not just waste. There's quite a bit of stuff in there that could still be "digested".
From the Ted talk:
When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them from a regular mouse. Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them eat as much as they want.
So apparently some microbes allow you to extract more energy from your food so you put on more weight for a given amount of calories. But other ones might affect your appetite somehow. There's more in the talk, and it's not just mice: there's research in humans as well.