The bacteria diet: It may help us lose weight

William Atkins
Thursday, 24 January 2008 21:03

Science - Health

A British-Swiss study has found that feeding mice a certain type of bacterium helps them reduce the amount of fat digested. If successfully applied to humans, such a change could help us reduce the obesity problem.       

British biochemist Jeremy Nicholson and fellow colleagues from Imperial College London (England) and Nestle Research Center (Switzerland) fed laboratory mice two different strains of prebiotic Lactobacillus (L. paracasei and L. rhamnosus), after replacing their normal microbes with human microbes—what are commonly called gut microbes. A control group of mice were given a saline solution.

They compared the levels of the microbic action in blood, feces, liver, and urine of the mice that were fed and not fed the Lactobacillus, or what is commonly called a “friendly” type of microbe. The researchers found that the microbes ate more fat, and then the fat-absorbed microbes were expelled by normal excretion.

The researchers contend that these Lactobacillus bacteria could be introduced into probiotics, which are foods such as yogurt that contain live bacteria, in order to have a pronounced affect on human metabolism.

In other words, it could help people eliminate additional fat from their digestive system in order to control obesity better and to make weight loss more efficient, along with the ability to better control problems such as diabetes, allergies, and bowel diseases.

Nicholson stated, “Our study shows that probiotics can have an effect and they interact with the local ecology and talk to other bacteria. We’re still trying to understand what the changes they bring about might mean, in terms of overall health, but we have established that introducing ’friendly’ bacteria can change the dynamics of the whole population of microbes in the gut.” [EurekAlert!: “Probiotics affect metabolism, says new study”]

The article (“Probiotic modulation of symbiotic gut microbial–host metabolic interactions in a humanized microbiome mouse model”) from the Nicholson team study was published in the Tuesday, January 15, 2008 issue of the journal Molecular Systems Biology.