Studies suggest that gut bacteria may play a powerful role in body weight regulation.
Hundreds of microorganisms reside in your digestive system.
The majority of these are friendly bacteria that produce several important nutrients, including vitamin K and certain B vitamins.
They also help break down fibre, which your body can’t digest, turning it into beneficial short-chain fatty acids like butyrate.
There are two main families of good bacteria in the gut: Bacteroidetes and firmicutes. Body weight seems to be related to the balance of these two families of bacteria.
Both human and animal studies have found that moderate-weight people have different gut bacteria than those with overweight or obesity.
In the majority of those studies, people with obesity had more firmicutes and fewer Bacteroidetes, compared with moderate-weight people.
However, several studies have failed to find a connection between the firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes ratio and obesity.
People with obesity tend to have less diverse gut bacteria than lean people. What’s more, those with obesity who have less diverse gut bacteria tend to gain more weight than people with obesity who have more diverse gut bacteria.
Some animal studies also show that when gut bacteria from mice with obesity were transplanted into the guts of lean mice, the lean mice developed obesity.
In clinic we link with world renowned labs to offer state of the art stool testing. These tests can identify all the major bacteria and look at the balance of good to bad. They can certainly speed up a treatment protocol, by identifying the root cause, be it H. Pylori, SIBO, parasites, candida. They measure gut inflammation and immune function as well as blood in the stool.
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