The Fatted Half
Coincidentally enough, this week's New Scientist has another article about a way to eat more without getting fat. This one has to do with the bacteria living in your gut.
Evidently, certain kinds of bacteria that live in testino [sorry] may increase the efficiency of caloric extraction by breaking down incompletely-digested components of food that found their want into the gut, thereby making more calories' worth of energy available for bodily absorption. For example, complex carbohydrates that survive into the gut may be broken down in to simple ones by the microorganisms. It seems that as much as 30% of our bodies' caloric-extraction efficiency may be associated with gut flora. In short, depending on their gut flora, the same-size serving of the same food may have different effective caloric values for different people.
Theoretically, then, we might be able to manipulate gut ecology to affect the efficiency of caloric extraction and thereby change the relationship between food intake and weight gain. The article, of course, emphasizes the 'eat more, weigh less' aspect. At least they did address my immediate thought, though, even if only in the very last paragraph: maximizing the extractive efficiency of impoverished people's gut flora, so they receive full energetic and nutritional value from what food they get.
The academically interesting aspect of this information is that evolution may thus involve outsourcing. It may be more evolutionarily efficient to host organisms to do certain physiological jobs for you than to do them yourself. I've no idea what immediate implications that may have for anything, but it offers a new thing to consider.
(This reminds me of the tangentially-related, but utterly fascinating, realization that the "rusticles" on the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic seem to be organized in a rudimentary sort of 'tissue differentiation' supplied by an internal gravity-driven 'circulatory system'.)
Evidently, certain kinds of bacteria that live in testino [sorry] may increase the efficiency of caloric extraction by breaking down incompletely-digested components of food that found their want into the gut, thereby making more calories' worth of energy available for bodily absorption. For example, complex carbohydrates that survive into the gut may be broken down in to simple ones by the microorganisms. It seems that as much as 30% of our bodies' caloric-extraction efficiency may be associated with gut flora. In short, depending on their gut flora, the same-size serving of the same food may have different effective caloric values for different people.
Theoretically, then, we might be able to manipulate gut ecology to affect the efficiency of caloric extraction and thereby change the relationship between food intake and weight gain. The article, of course, emphasizes the 'eat more, weigh less' aspect. At least they did address my immediate thought, though, even if only in the very last paragraph: maximizing the extractive efficiency of impoverished people's gut flora, so they receive full energetic and nutritional value from what food they get.
The academically interesting aspect of this information is that evolution may thus involve outsourcing. It may be more evolutionarily efficient to host organisms to do certain physiological jobs for you than to do them yourself. I've no idea what immediate implications that may have for anything, but it offers a new thing to consider.
(This reminds me of the tangentially-related, but utterly fascinating, realization that the "rusticles" on the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic seem to be organized in a rudimentary sort of 'tissue differentiation' supplied by an internal gravity-driven 'circulatory system'.)
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 13:24
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