Obesity may not result from what and how much you eat but from bacteria in your guts, researchers now say.
The finding could some day alter the way obese are advised to reduce their weight with combination of diet and exercise. In a discovery of far reaching consequences, researchers found that the make up of microbes in the intestines of obese people are different from those of slim people and they could be helping to gain weight.
They found that microbes taken from fat mouse made and transplanted in another animal's intestine made it gain more than normal fat. The researchers,
Nature magazine said, propose that the obese-prone microbes glean more calories from food, which are sucked up by the body and deposited as excess fat.
"Minor differences in the calories you can harvest might play an important role in predisposition to obesity," Jeffrey Gordon at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, who led the studies, was quoted as saying.
The implications for people trying to lose weight are, for now, unclear. It is not known how easy it is to change a person's microbial balance, for example, or whether that might have unwanted health consequences,
Nature said.
Stephen Bloom, obesity expert at the Imperial College London, notes that the body's other weight-regulating mechanisms might step in to compensate for any gut microbe changes. Every person's gut is home to a unique cocktail of trillions of bacteria and other minute bugs that help break down food and fight off invading pathogens.
In 2004, Gordon first proposed that this medley of microbes might