Slanted Science

Bacteria, eh? Nasty little things.

Strutting around, with their tiny little genomes, doing nothing but bringing misery to mankind: food poisoning; meningitis; halitosis and…obesity? That’s the theory being put forward in a new paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Here’s the basics of this study: researchers from St Louis and Boulder, headed by Jeffrey Gordon, generated a set of mice which were completely germ-free. That is, the mice had no bacteria or other microorganisms anywhere on themselves (including within their intestinal tract) or in their lab environment. The boffins then implanted into the guts of these mice bacteria which they had previously collected from samples of human fecal matter.

What a crap job it must be to collect those bacteria…sorry.

Anyway, to continue: the scientists observed that the implanted bacteria colonized the mice’s digestive tracts with the kind of microbial diversity seen in humans, thus forming a testing system which was far more complex than is possible in traditional, ‘in vitro‘ laboratory models.

Having established the bacteria within the mice, the scientists changed the diet of half the mice from their regular, low-fat and low-sugar diet to one more typical of the modern Western world: high in fats and sugars. These mice gained weight, which was no surprise. What was amazing was that their gut microbial spectrum underwent a rapid shift: the intestines began to become more heavily populated by a group of bacteria called Firmicutes.

These bacteria are known to be much better at breaking down the tough, hard-to-digest materials in food, leaving their previously inaccessible calories available for absorption by the host mouse or human.

Thus, it appears that our modern diet is killing us in two ways: not only do we take in more of the easily-absorbed calories, but in doing so we encourage the growth of those bacteria which help us to take the calories from even supposedly healthy foods such as vegetables.

We would like to urge caution, however, in your response to this news. We are in the very early stages of this research, so please be patient and don’t start cramming probiotic yogurts and other such nonsense down your gullet. It is unlikely that these products have any benefits – the organisms they contain almost certainly being dissolved by stomach acids before they get to their intended target, for a start – and, as we reported recently, the European Union has recently clamped down hard on the companies marketing them.

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: a greater understanding of our natural gut flora, and perhaps drugs or other interventions designed to alter them for our benefit.

Lastly, we highly recommend this wonderful book by Michael Pollan, which describes some of the horrors associated with modern foods. It might just scare those nasty Firmicutes straight out of you.