Is having good bacteria in the gut the key to weight loss and other benefits?

Much attention as of late has been turning to the fauna of the digestive tract, and how it affects our health. With recent studies showing the affects of processed food and over-use of antibiotics causing harm to the natural "good" bacteria that we need for everything from digestion to our immune system, it may be time we turn our attention to how to keep our bodie's naturally occuring beneficial bacteria helpful and functioning properly.

Most of our microbes inhabit the colon, the final loop of intestine, where they help us break down fibers, harvest calories, and protect us from micro-marauders. But they also do much, much more. Animals raised without microbes essentially lack a functioning immune system. Entire repertoires of white blood cells remain dormant; their intestines don't develop the proper creases and crypts; their hearts are shrunken; genes in the brain that should be in the "off" position remain stuck "on." Without their microbes, animals aren't really "normal."

What do we do for our microbes in return? Some scientists argue that mammals are really just mobile digestion chambers for bacteria. After all, your stool is roughly half living bacteria by weight. Every day, food goes in one end and microbes come out the other. The human gut is roughly 26 feet in length. Hammered flat, it would have a surface area of a tennis court. Seventy percent of our immune activity occurs there. The gut has its own nervous system; it contains as many neurons as the spinal cord. About 95 percent of the body's serotonin, a neurotransmitter usually discussed in the context of depression, is produced in the gut.

Additionally, the article goes on, to show a corrolation between children exposed to natural positive bacteria having a lower rate of allergies and other ailments. 

So the gut isn't just where we absorb nutrients. It's also an immune hub and a second brain. And it's crawling with microbes. They don't often cross the walls of the intestines into the blood stream, but they nevertheless change how the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems all work on the other side of the intestine wall.

Science isn't always consistent about what, exactly, goes wrong with our microbes in disease situations. But a recurrent theme is that loss of diversity correlates with the emergence of illness. Children in the developing world have many more types of microbes than kids in Europe or North America, and yet generally develop allergies and asthma at lower rates than those in industrialized nations. In the developed world, children raised in microbially rich environments—with pets, on farms, or attending day care—have a lower risk of allergic disease than kids raised in more sterile environments.

Additional concerns that modern medicine is depriving the body of microbes that it needs to properly function:

Those who study human microbial communities fret that they are undergoing an extinction crisis similar to the one afflicting the biosphere at large—and that modern medicine may be partly to blame. Some studies find that babies born by C-section, deprived of their mother's vaginal microbes at birth, have a higher risk of celiac disease, Type 1 diabetes, and obesity. Early-life use of antibiotics—which tear through our microbial ecosystems like a forest fire—has also been linked to allergic disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and obesity.

Which brings us to the question more and more scientists are asking: If our microbiota plays a role in keeping us healthy, then how about attacking disease by treating the microbiota? After all, our community of microbes is quite plastic. New members can arrive and take up residence. Old members can get flushed out. Member ratios can shift. The human genome, meanwhile, is comparatively stiff and unresponsive. So the microbiota represents a huge potential leverage point in our quest to treat, and prevent, chronic disease. In particular, the "forgotten organ," as some call the microbiota, may hold the key to addressing our single greatest health threat: obesity.

Read more of the original article here: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/gut-microbiome-bacteria-weight-loss?page=2

The affect of even a little sugar on obesity and diabetes rates.

From United Press Intl. 

Although obesity predisposes people to type 2 diabetes, U.S. researchers suggest sugar may also have a direct, independent link to diabetes.

Lead author Dr. Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and colleagues examined data on global sugar availability and diabetes rates from 175 countries over the past decade.

The study, published in the journal PLoS One, found, after accounting for obesity and a large array of other factors, increased sugar in a population's food supply was linked to higher type 2 diabetes rates, independent of obesity rates.

"It was quite a surprise," Basu said in a statement. The research was conducted while Basu was a medical resident at University of California, San Francisco, and working with senior author Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital.

"We're not diminishing the importance of obesity at all, but these data suggest that at a population level there are additional factors that contribute to diabetes risk besides obesity and total calorie intake, and that sugar appears to play a prominent role," the researchers said.

For every additional 150 calories of sugar available per person per day, the prevalence of diabetes in the population rose 1 percent, even after controlling for obesity, physical activity, other types of calories and a number of economic and social variables, the study found.

Chinese, Taiwanese Scientists teaming up to find a natural treatment for Metabolic Syndrome / Obesity.

Obesity might be a very modern problem, but a team of scientists from Taiwan and China is turning to the age-old principles of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to help fight it. Breaking research published in the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics indicates a possible new direction for the treatment of metabolic syndrome.

TCM compounds have long been recognised as potential lead candidates in creating anti-viral, anti-tumour and anti-inflammation agents. To see whether they might also be used to design agonists targeting PPAR-a, PPAR-g, and PPAR-∂ in the fight against metabolic disease, the researchers consulted the TCM Database@Taiwan, which lists more than 30,000 small-molecule compounds of TCM origin. The team ran a series of models and simulations to virtually screen the database, establishing structure-based pharmacore models for each PPAR protein in order to identify the key actions during docking; molecular dynamics simulation and homology modelling were also performed.

Metabolic syndrome, a collective disorder characterised by obesity and multiple clinical disorders, is on the rise. Obesity itself is an endocrine disease caused by the body's inability to handle excessive energy intake. It can lead to serious chronic diseases like hypertension, osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea, stroke and type-2 diabetes.

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are key regulators of lipid and carbohydrate metabolism; they are involved in regulating many physiological functions initiated by nutrients, nutraceuticals and phytochemicals. There are three subtypes of PPARs -- PPAR-a, PPAR-g and PPAR-∂ -which all play important roles. Because of these roles, the three are also important drug targets for treating metabolic syndrome.

Fructose Linked to Overeating, and Obesity, New Study shows.

Now more than ever, the importance of knowing what sweeteners and sweets you are eating, could play a role in your health. Maple Syrup is good, High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad. "This is your brain on sugar – for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating." 

Suspicions about high fructose foods have been evident for the last decade, but now more acute study has shown this sugar's serious negative health side effects. 

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues – it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

Now more than ever, the evidence shows that to stay healthy, we indeed need to watch what we eat, and pass by the processed foods whenever possible. 

High fat diets may be linked to depression.

The latest in the news has multiple stories that are being reported even in the mainstream media on the effects of your diet on your health. However, often we forget that health includes mental health. Various reports have shown certain foods affect mood, and also the ability for one to function at top performance, both physically and mentally. 

This new study though, weighs heavy on the mind.... literally. 

From Scientific American: 

" What is the effect of a high fat diet? Well, it appears to be getting more complicated with each new study.

It looks like diet-induced obesity might produce depressive-like effects in mice. But how the diet is doing that is not so well defined.

*“Diet-induced obesity promotes depressive-like behaviour that is associated with neural adaptations in brain reward circuitry” International Journal of Obesity, 2012.

Several studies in humans have found a correlation between obesity and the development of depression. But it’s important to keep in mind that correlation is not causation. Many people who become obese also have other things going on (socioeconomic status, family history, comorbid disorders) which can influence the development of depression. In order to determine if obesity itself is causing depression, you first have to deliberately cause obesity in a controlled population.

And this is where mice come in. Using a specialty high fat and high sugar diet, Sharma and Fulton fed up a set of mice for 12 weeks, until they were significantly fatter than control mice. They then looked at behavioral tests for anxiety and depression.

Depressive-like behavior has been correlated in the past with changes in stress-responses, so the authors looked at the stress hormone corticosterone (which is cortisol in humans). High-fat diet mice showed slightly higher corticosterone, but much higher levels after stress, suggesting that they may be more sensitive to stress than normal mice.

The authors also looked at alterations in reward pathways like the nucleus accumbens and striatum, and found significant changes. Though changes in these areas are not usually correlated with depressive-like behavior, they have been shown in other high fat studies and are thought to relate to differences in how animals eating high fat diets process rewards.

From these data the authors conclude that their high-fat diet obesity produced depressive-like behavior. And while I think the preliminary data has potential, I also think there could be improvements...." 

Read more from the original story here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2012/05/02/high-fat-diets-and-depression-a-look-in-mice/?WT.mc_id=SA_syn_HuffPo

Soft Drinks: Public Health Enemy #1 with links to obesity and more.

In stories we ran some time ago, we noted various studies that link soft drinks containing high Fructose Corn Syrup to Obesity, and many of the numbers are staggering. Additionally, Diet sodas have a corrolation with other health issues. While it's easy to opine that it's just better to drink water or juice (it is), remember that originally most soft drinks were served in small cups, often no more than a couple ounces over ice, or occasionaly as an apertif. This development of drinking liters of cola is a recent thing, and the links to health woes are too prevalent to ignore. 

CNN- NY TIMES 

(CNN) -- Pushing her meal cart into the hospital room, a research assistant hands out tall glasses of reddish-pink liquid, along with a gentle warning: "Remember, you guys have to finish all your Kool-Aid."

One by one, young volunteers chug down their drinks, each carefully calibrated to contain a mix of water, flavoring and a precisely calibrated solution of high fructose corn syrup: 55% fructose, 45% glucose.

The participants are part of an ongoing study run by Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis. Volunteers agree to spend several weeks as lab rats: their food carefully measured, their bodies subjected to a steady dose of scans and blood tests. At first, each volunteer receives meals with no added sugars. But then, the sweetened drinks start showing up.

For the final two weeks of the study, volunteers drank three of the sweet concoctions daily -- about 500 calories of added sugar, or 25% of all calories for the adult women in the study. Within just two weeks, their blood chemistry was out of whack. In one striking change, the volunteers had elevated levels of LDL cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease.

While force-feeding junk food may sound extreme, this controlled diet is not so far from the real world. A 20-ounce regular soda contains 227 calories, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That single drink is more than 10% of the total calories an adult woman needs to maintain a healthy weight, according to USDA diet guidelines. Meanwhile, about 1 in 4 Americans gets at least 200 calories a day from sugary drinks. These numbers, along with work like Stanhope's, gives ammunition to doctors and public health officials who say soda should be treated as public health enemy No. 1.

"Soft drinks and sugar-containing beverages are the low hanging fruit in public health today," says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center, at Children's Hospital in Boston. "Many children are consuming 300 calories per day or more, just in sugar-containing beverages. Compare the challenge of giving up three glasses of sugary beverages, versus getting them to do two hours of moderate physical activity."

"If you switch from Coke to water, that's easy," says Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, a professor at the University of North Carolina and a recent president of the American Diabetes Association. "You don't have to make big complicated changes in how you cook, and shop, and all that. And the number of calories you can save, can be substantial."

Related story: Are sugar substitutes worse than the real thing?

Some in the soft drink business say their product has been unfairly singled out. "Consumption of added sugars is going down," says Karen Hanretty, Vice-President of Public Affairs for the American Beverage Association. "Soda consumption has declined, even as obesity has increased. To say that sugar is solely responsible for obesity, doesn't make sense."

Coca-Cola has adapted to meet consumer demand, says Rhona Applebaum, the company's Vice President and Chief Scientific Regulatory Officer. More than ever, she says, those consumers choose low-sugar products. Today, Diet Coke and Coke Zero make up 41% of Coke's North American soda sales, up from 32% a decade ago. "Our products are part of a balanced, sensible diet, and they can be enjoyed as a valuable part of any meal, including snacks," says Applebaum.

Buried in the flood of horror stories about America's obesity crisis, are a few hopeful signs. Not only is sugar consumption going down, but obesity rates among girls and women have actually stayed flat since 1999, according to Cynthia Ogden, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). For boys and men, those levels have increased only modestly since around 2006, Ogden says.

Coincidentally or not, the leveling off of obesity coincides with a drop in the amount of soda that Americans consume. Consumption of soda -- both regular and diet -- has fallen by 17.3% since 1998, according to Beverage Digest.

Read the original Story here: http://us.cnn.com/2012/04/27/health/soda-obesity/index.html?c=homepage-t

EDITORIAL: Misplaced Blame on Obesity

This editorial piece was written by a contributor for the Frederick News-Post, Md., and brings up some thoughtful consideration on the obesity epidemic currently taking place in the United States of America. 

EDITORIAL: MISPLACED BLAME

Aug. 30--Obese Americans have a lot of company these days, but if a recently released report is correct, by 2030 every other person in the nation will be obese.

The report released last week by the British medical journal the Lancet focused on obesity worldwide, where it is becoming an increasingly unsustainable health care expense.

What caught our attention about this report's findings and recommendations wasn't the global trend towards obesity or what half of all Americans will look and feel like in less than 20 years.

Rather, it was the report's findings on why all this is happening, and its recommendations for addressing it.

According to The Washington Post story that reported on the Lancet article, "Changes over the past century to the way food is made and marketed have contributed to the creation of an 'obesogenic' environment in which personal willpower and efforts to maintain a healthful weight are largely impossible ..."

The fix involves " ... making healthful foods cheaper and less-healthful foods more expensive largely through tax strategies ... Changes in the way foods are marketed would also be called for ..."

The cost of this epidemic is already staggering, but it will increase dramatically if not addressed. Everyone seems to agree that America's health care system is broken, but seems mystified how to fix it. With so many stakeholders with different, even conflicting, concerns, it is a genuinely daunting challenge.

But wouldn't truly addressing this epidemic of obesity be one of the most productive solutions to pursue?

And wouldn't it be great if Americans decided they could do this on their own, individually and collectively as a nation -- without the government's "help"?

This report doesn't seem to believe that's possible. Again from The Post story: "Though the report acknowledged that it's ultimately up to individuals to decide what to eat and how to live, it maintained that governments have largely abdicated the responsibility for addressing obesity to individuals, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations. Yet the obesity epidemic will not be reversed without government leadership, regulation, and investment in programs, monitoring and research."

In other words, it's the government's fault that we're becoming an obese nation, and now its help is required to fix the problem. Are either one or both of these assertions really true?

If so, that says something awfully sad about what both the American people and their government have become.

Update: Life expectancy in U.S. trails top nations

 New analysis of government data shows that the U.S. is once again lagging behind in health. On a county to county basis, many demographics are lagging behind Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and Canada.

 With consistant evidence and hard data pointing to changes in diet, exercise and personal habits having a dramatic effect on health; this study further shows that something as simple as diet and smoking tobacco can have extremely negative long-term consequences to our longevity, and heath, further taxing our health care system.

Link through to video from CNN.com From CNN.com

Life expectancy in most U.S. counties lags behind that of the world's healthiest nations, in some cases by 50 years or more, according to a new analysis of government data.

For instance, in Holmes County, Mississippi, which has the lowest life expectancy in the country, a woman can expect to live 73.5 years, the average life span that women in the healthiest nations had in 1957 and have since far surpassed.

To determine how American life spans stack up internationally, researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. compared life expectancies in the U.S. to a moving average of those in the 10 nations with the lowest death rates, a group that includes other affluent countries such as Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and Canada.

The authors suggest that smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, and other behaviors and conditions that contribute to poor health and early deaths might be responsible.

Locally tailored programs that aim to help people quit smoking, lose weight, and otherwise improve their health may help reverse the troubling life-expectancy trends, they say.