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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.
Yes, but if you want to know how obese a city is you now have a new choice. A) Analyze at remains from the sewer B) Analyze photos from Facebook or C) Spend 5 minutes at the local Walmart.
The news here for me isn't "here's a way to analyse a city's obesity rate", it's just yet another piece of evidence for "obesity is caused primarily by gut fauna". This would seem to add up with the obese population's assertion that losing weight is incredibly hard, while the non-obese population asserts "just eat less, it's trivially easy". The only way these two assertions can add up is if the two populations have some very different environmental factor going on. Gut fauna making obese people absorb much more of the energy from their food would seem to add up as just that kind of environmental factor.
I agree, but, perhaps what a person eats shapes their gut fuana to best digest their diet. If you spend years eating only twinkies and ho-hos...