Desperate to lose weight and wondering why you just can’t shed those pounds? It might not be your fault. And the thing holding you back might be a whole lot smaller than you think.
While the food you consume obviously plays a part, the Associated Press reports that your level of obesity may all come down to bacteria living inside your gut.
Scientists at Washington University in the US state of Missouri took a bunch of fatties and a bunch of thinnies who happened to be twins. They used twins in order to rule out the old inheritance argument, otherwise known the “I’m just big-boned” excuse.
What they did next was transplant the gut bacteria of the fat and thin twins into young mice that had been raised germ-free.
Amazingly, the mice who received gut bacteria from the fat people got fatter even though they didn’t eat more than the mice who received germs from the skinny twins.
So in other words, it was the little germs doing all the dirty work.
The study appeared in the journal Science. Its senior author Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University’s Center of Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, was already well aware that obese people have less diverse gut bacteria, and this took the research to a whole new level.
So if you have the wrong bacteria, are you doomed to a lifetime of spare tires?
Obviously not, because as mentioned, the right diet can still help. But this research may foreseeably lead to diet pills containing more of the right kind of bacteria, which would help people with the wrong type of bacteria lose weight.
Don’t hold your breath, though. Dr Gordon said even the first attempt to make such a drug would take at least five more years of research.
The original article appeared on NEWS.COM.AU