Gut Bacteria won’t directly cause you to lose weight. Instead, it’s the effects of their activities rippling through your body which can help lose, gain or maintain your weight.
All this because they help determining how much energy your body absorbs, and how hungry or full you feel.
The human body is a host to a great number of microbes, including bacterial, fungal and protozoal microorganisms, which together form your microbiota. It consists up to 100 trillions microbes, and possesses at least 100 times more genes than are present in the entire human genome.
The human microbiome represents an exciting new target for dietary changes and treatments aimed at combating obesity. Research at King’s College London, found that specific groups of microbes living in your gut could be protective against obesity. Our genes influences their abundance. Scientists found that participants with a more diverse community of bacteria in their feces had generally lower levels of visceral fat.
Visceral Fat is body fat that is stored in the abdominal cavity near a number of important internal organs.It is linked with higher risks of metabolic diseases.
What is the function of gut bacteria ?
Producing additional energy inaccessible to the host by breaking down soluble fiber. Including vitamins such biotin, folate and vitamin K, metabolizing xenobiotics such as the inactivation of heterocyclic amines formed in meat during cooking. Also fermenting unused food (energy substrates), preventing colonization by pathogens and assisting in the development of a mature immune system.
When microorganisms live in relative balance, this state is called normobiosis. However, when this balance is upset, because one or more microorganisms that have grown out of proportion to the other species, this results in a state called gut dysbiosis. Researchers have found a direct link between dysbiosis and diseases.
Evidence shows that exist a link with the intestinal microbiome and overall health. This including obesity risk or simple weight gain, and a relationship with nutrition. The bacteria in your gut does not play an important role in digestion but whether or not you become obese.
Obesity and metabolic disorders are presented by alterations in the function and composition of the gut microbiome. Consequently can influence the energy balance from the diet. Manipulating these compositions can alter the microbiome and facilitate weight loss.
Why two people eat the same amount of calories and absorb different amounts of energy?
The calorie-converting abilities can change over a person’s lifetime with age and other factors. Some people have a gut more efficient than others at extracting calories from food.
Your intestines involve trillions of microbes that work in many ways and it is possible to make changes if you want to do. The immune system determines levels of inflammation in the gut that are constantly shaping the way you digest food. Also how absorbing many calories and how many nutrients simply pass through.
People who take for example, antibiotics, kill off some of the microbes that occur normally in the gut, which help to digest food. By breaking down nutrients and helping them pass through the walls of the bowel, these microbes serve as a sort of barrier between what is eaten and what actually makes it into the body. Killing them have consequences like a decrease in diversity in the gut microbiome and an association with obesity.
Low fecal bacteria:
Its diversity have an association with more marked overall adiposity and dyslipidemia, impaired glucose homeostasis and higher low grade inflammation.
Overweight individuals have more Firmicutes and less Bacteroidetes than the lean individuals. Studies shown that people who are following a low-carbohydrate diet for one year, lost as much as 25% of their body weight. The proportion of Firmicutes in their colon dropped and that of the Bacteroidetes rise.
Experimental treatment for serious infections like Clostridium difficile we use in fecal transplants from gut bacteria between humans. Obese patients who receiving transplants from lean donors, later had healthier responses to insulin and loss of weight.
Research has shown that adding even a single bacterial species to a person’s gut can alter her metabolism. People who took a probiotic containing Akkermansia muciniphila which is typically found in non obese people, could experience a metabolic improvement and weight loss. This does not mean that anyone has to take this type of bacteria, but it is an idea that you could change your microbiome and have metabolic benefits.
Can diet influence the composition of the gut microbiota?
Dietary habits are considered to be one of the main factors that contribute to the diversity of the human gut microbiota.
Fibers are the components of vegetables, cereals, leguminous seeds and fruits that are not digested in the stomach or in the small intestines. They are fermented in the colon by the gut microbiome and excreted in the feces. Additionally dietary fibers have been identified as strong, positive dietary factors in the prevention of weight gain.
” You may be able to achieve higher gut microbiota diversity by increase your fiber intake”
Diets including more plant-based food, have a more diverse microbiome.
How can you prevent weight gain by modulation of the gut microbiota ?
Targeting microbiota may present a new way to prevent and treat metabolic disorders. Strategies such as dietary manipulation, the use of prebiotics, probiotics or synbiotics and transplantation of fecal microbial communities are now applied.
What is Prebiotics?
Prebiotics are a food ingredient that host cannot digests and whose beneficial effects on the host result from the selective stimulation of growth or activity of the gut microbiota particularly Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria. Prebiotics can alter the gut microflora, and seems to reduce adipose tissue.
Examples of common prebiotics are inulin( inulin is a type of soluble fiber. The gut bacteria convert inulin and other prebiotics into short-chain fatty acids.) oligosaccharides (or fructooligosaccharides are a form of carbohydrate. The term saccharide is another word for sugar). Resistant starch(resistant starch is a carbohydrate that resist digestion in the small intestine and ferments in the large intestine. It is a prebiotic and feed the good bacteria in the gut. (Example: oats). Fiber diet that is fermented contains a good amount of prebiotics.
Probiotics are live microorganisms which confer a health benefit on the host. Yogurt, cheese, fermented milk, fermented foods such as kombucha, raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar, fermented vegetables are examples of probiotics.
Probiotic microorganisms act in the large intestine by affecting the intestinal flora and other organs, modulating immunological parameters.
Supplements help to boost your beneficial microbes such as Lactobacilli, streptococci and Bifidobacteria which are normal populations in your gut. Lactobacillus gasseri found in fermented milk lead to a significant reduction in abdominal visceral fat area in a randomized-controlled trial in obese individuals. Other microbes such as yeast (Saccharomyces boulardii) which are not normally found in your intestines are a potential probiotic, used in addition to a variety of probiotic strains.
What is Synbiotics?
Synbiotics are a combination of a prebiotic with a probiotic and have more substantial effects on the gut microbiota.
Fecal microbiota transplant is one of the newest treatment to treat disease. A healthy person’s microbiota is put into a patient’s gut. The transplant repopulates a microbiome with diverse bacteria that helps to fight the bacterium off.
Conclusion :
Obese and lean subjects presentes an increasing levels of different bacterial populations. The gut microbiota is critical for normal digestion of nutrients. Its metabolic activities facilitate the extraction of calories from ingested dietary substances, helping to store these calories in the host adipose tissue for later use and provide energy and nutrients for microbial growth and proliferation.
The manipulation of gut microbial with prebiotics and probiotics can prevent weight gain and weight loss, not forgetting the right diet and physical exercise.
by Helena
”You are What you and your Gut Microbiota eat”
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Ref:
researchgate.net
sciencedaily.com
bbc.com