The Secret Life of Fat by Sylvia Tara

Author:Sylvia Tara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Working with Your Microbiome

Microbiome research is a developing field, so most research and interpretation should be seen as preliminary. However, if you are curious to know what is in your microbiome, you can find out. The American Gut project in the U.S. is assembling a knowledge bank of bacteria that reside in participating individuals. For a fee, they will send you a kit and instructions for how to take swabs of bacteria from your body and mail them in to be analyzed. You then receive the results, indicating how your microbiome compares to others. The data may tell you if you have more or fewer Firmicutes in your colon, as well as other harmful and helpful bacteria. If you find you have a microbiome potentially tilted toward weight gain, what can you do to tilt it toward a lean one?

First, you can change your diet to contain more plant fiber that is challenging to digest—meaning fruits and vegetables—and fewer saturated fats. Not only does this reduce calories but also as your diet evolves, so will your bacteria. In experiments, mice that are fed a higher-calorie “Western diet” for eight weeks display higher levels of Firmicutes. But a diet including a healthy amount of fruits and vegetables and low in saturated fats allows the growth of diverse bacteria associated with lower weight.

Dr. Patrice Cani, of the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, studies the effect of prebiotics and probiotics on the microbiome. (Prebiotics are nondigestible plant carbohydrates that nourish the essential bacteria in our gut. Probiotics are actual bacteria that provide benefits to our health.) Cani says, “Prebiotics reduce food intake, and increase satiety in healthy subjects. They will change the composition or activity of some microbes, and will have a beneficial impact on health.”

Cani’s studies show that eating at least sixteen grams of prebiotics, contained in foods such as bananas, artichokes, and legumes, daily for two weeks promotes satiety and reduces eating. Oligo-fructose, found in onions, oats, and leeks, has also shown to effect a modest decrease in visceral fat mass, and decrease hunger. These prebiotic foods not only reduce appetite but also increase calcium absorption and are associated with greater diversity of bacteria in the gut, which is beneficial for weight loss. Prebiotics help induce a higher preponderance of Bacteroidetes, as well as a hundred-fold increase in another beneficial bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila.

Cani has shown that A. muciniphila helps restores the mucous gut barrier that can be disrupted by a high-fat diet. Having a healthy mucous lining in our intestines creates a protective barrier, promotes healthy bacterial growth, increases innate immunity, and reduces the amount of toxins absorbed into the body. Ultimately, all this improves metabolism, lowers inflammation and insulin resistance, and helps reverse fat gain. Cani says, “High fat diets change the microbiota composition. If you change the microbiota composition, then in turn you can change gut biofunction.”

Indeed, the microbiome is an exciting new field of research and, one day, if we can get over the “yuck” factor, we may even want to consider fecal transplants to import helpful bacteria.

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