Blog: Some Weird things about Fat & Obesity
There is an epidemic of obesity in this country and, more recently, in Europe and China, based on our slacker lifestyle, our poor eating habits, our supersized snacks and drinks, consumption of high fructose corn syrup and moral weakness. Right?
Well maybe.
Obesity is a condition where our former ability (in aeons past) to maintain adequate body weight in order to survive has run amok under modern conditions and leftus disabled by the consequences of excess calories. It’s evolution. Right?
Perhaps.
About ten years ago I heard very distant bush drums with the news—the conjecture—that obesity might be an epidemic because it is an infectious disease, or the result of one. Not many revelations followed this then, but such conjecture did pop open a small window in my mind that kept it from swallowing wholesale the prevailing theories about obesity, it’s causes and cures. I hope the information I am about to impart will open a window in your mind and help keep your head from exploding from the pressure of all the “information” about obesity, fat, diet and exercise.
From Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Infectious Diseases, comes an article about the possible infectious nature of obesity as it relates to the microflora of our gut. The authors say: “Obesity results from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure, associated with a chronic low-grade inflammation….. dysbiosis and endotoxaemia may be inflammatory factors responsible for developing insulin resistance and body weight gain.” They go on to say that advances in the field of probiotics may help with the current obesity epidemic.
Ruth Ley et al report in Nature that “two groups of beneficial bacteria are dominant in the human gut, the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes. Here we show that the relative proportion of Bacteroidetes is decreased in obese people by comparison with lean people, and that this proportion increases with weight loss on two types of low-calorie diet. Our findings indicate that obesity has a microbial component, which might have potential therapeutic implications.”
It turns out that we humans are actually super-organisms; one tenth of our self is composed of human cells and their genomes and nine-tenths of “us” is composed of the microbes who live symbiotically with us and their genomes. They are a part of us as surely as our other cells are—at least from the time of our passage down the birth canal. Their metabolism is our metabolism and they may determine more than we thought. And they are transmissible.
In a very readable article in the NYTimes, Robin Henig discusses the finding that obese mice have different gut flora than non-obese mice and describes work done by an Indian scientist Dr. N. Dhurandhar on adenovirus and infectious obesity. Dr Dhurandhar was able to cause obesity in laboratory animals simply by infecting them with a certain strain of adenovirus. He called this infectobesity.
Further Dr Jeffrey I Gordon and colleagues reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine that when sterile mice were transplanted with certain human gut flora and fed a higher fat “Western diet”, within one day the gene expression of the microflora changed and began processing food in such a way as to produce obesity in the animals.
This is very exciting, paradigm-shifting work. The implications here are not that what we eat doesn’t matter, but that the reason why I can eat the same things as another person and still weigh more or less than they do, or why one person’s brain seems programmed to over-eating or intense food-seeking while another is not, has little to do with moral weakness or the sins of gluttony and sloth.
Understanding who “we” are as organisms is part of this mind shift. I hope it leads us to enlightenment and compassion and away from judgmentalism and ignorance.
