What happens when chocolate doughnuts mix with penicillin?

From today's NYT:

"What happens when chocolate doughnuts mix with penicillin?

The results of the study were dramatic, particularly in female mice: They gained about twice as much body fat as the control-group mice who ate the same food. “For the female mice, the antibiotic exposure was the switch that converted more of those extra calories in the diet to fat, while the males grew more in terms of both muscle and fat,” Dr. Blaser writes. “The observations are consistent with the idea that the modern high-calorie diet alone is insufficient to explain the obesity epidemic and that antibiotics could be contributing.”

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I've been spending more and more of my "research" time on the relationship between gut health and obesity.  By "gut health" I mean this:  We all have a few trillion bacteria living in our guts - roughly 10 times the number of cells in the rest of our body.  Most of these, most of the time are beneficial, acting in concert with our bodies to digest things we can't and produce various hormones, enzymes, fatty acids, and other by-products to keep us healthy.  There appears to be a connection between our diets and the make up of our gut ecosystem, or biome.  Makes sense... feed the bacteria well, and they're our friends - pumping out good stuff.  Don't feed them, and they die off or produce poorly.  We become unbalanced, as crucial products are not produced.

None of this is much in dispute.  What is interesting is the growing body of evidence that gut health and obesity may be closely related.  Today's New York Times provides a missing link.  The use (and many would say overuse) of antibiotics may be a direct cause of obesity.  Possibly because antibiotics seriously disrupts our gut biome - killing off scads of beneficial bacteria (bad) and potentially allowing enemy bacteria to take over (worse).  I became interested because before my VSG I was traveling in India and got sick - so I bombed my guts with a powerful antibiotic.  OF course a few weeks later I had surgery, and during and  after surgery I was once again nuked with antibiotics.  As a result, I ended up with thrush (an overgrowth of nasties) and had to treat that... but I figured the problems went deeper and kept searching around.

There is a LOT of research to do in this area. The personal bio-hacking community on the internet is playing around with these concepts - there's now an "American Gut" research project where you can have your biome analysed - http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/ - they've raised nearly 1/2 million dollars selling a kit for analysis... and there are other mini-experiments going on regarding the types of foods that are very healthy at building (or re-building) ones biome.  Think fermented stuff: Sauerkraut, Kim Chi, yogurt (live cultures only please), etc. and a different kind of fiber (called "fermentable fiber") that passes through your digestive system untouched until it gets to the bacteria that like it... 

Anyway - it's an area of intense focus right now in the scientific world and you'll probably be seeing a ton of articles (many of which will probably promote some expensive supplement - none of which are needed it seems) 

Check out the article here:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru g.html?_r=0

Tom

Makes me remember I need to get some pro-biotics because I just finished some penecillan for a tooth abscess. 

Jane

Hot tip lately is to look for a pro-biotic with "SBOs" - soil-based organisms.  We used to get a lot of our gut bacteria from veggies we ate right out of the ground, thus consuming lots of beneficial bacteria - now everything is sterilized.  

I use "Primal Defense" by Garden of Life.  I hear that Prescript-Assist is also good.  I'll probably bounce back and forth between a few different brands as they have different compositions.

I was just reading about this in one of the managed care journals.  The interesting thrust I found was the discussion of the beginning (and continuation) of 'prophylactic antibiotics' in many factory farms.  While they do have the intended effect of producing less ill animals, it also had the side effect of adding between 6 and 50% more body mass to the animals as well, dramatically increasing profits.  

A human study was done in the 40's I believe on children in guatemala that also found a similar effect.  My understanding from the reading was that Jonas Salk of all people was pretty concerned for the implication on wellness in general related to the over-use of antibiotics and spoke specifically to the concerns related to obesity. 

Now if you don't mind I have to finish my vancomycin shake... 

What's interesting in the article is that the original intent was not healthier animals - that was a side effect - allowing "factory farming" to begin in earnest... the original "magic" was the weight gain.  Still a bit of a mystery, but I'd put my money on disruption of the biome...

This is fascinating to me.  I'm going to spend some time tonight looking at these links and sharing them with my hubby, who takes LOTS of antibiotics for constant sinus issues.  

The book "Missing Microbes" by Dr. Blaser will be available on April 8th.  I hope its readable.

f