Quote:
Originally Posted by batman1425
A major contributor to obesity is gut microbiome. How we are born (traditional or c-section), what our parents feed us, how many rounds of antibiotics we get early in life, all play into shaping what our microbial communities ultimately become. The majority of that plays out over the first 3 or 4 years of life. After that, the biodiversity that we are going to have is more or less fixed. We can give it nudges in different directions, but making substantive changes after that point is very difficult. Those microbes talk to us (biochemically), we talk back, and they have substantive changes on our physiology and long term health outcomes.
Obesity can be a microbially transferable outcome, lots of experimental evidence and case reports in patients to support this. There is also strong evidence to support that the way the western world lives (not just diet - see examples above) is rapidly and fundamentally changing the ecology of the microbes in and on us. We are losing biodiversity. Microbes that used to be cornerstone species in the human gut are now completely extinct in people from the western world. That loss of biodiversity is a determinant of obesity and other conditions that were once thought to be exclusively genetically, behaviorally, or environmentally based.
Precisely, and that diet is one of the most important determinants for what our microbiome becomes, and how it works. The western diet/lifestyle has fundamentally changed the composition and function of our microbes and on a time scale that our own evolutionary mechanisms cannot keep up with. Evidence suggests that these microbial changes are key contributor to the increased rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other conditions whose rate of increase simple can't be explained by genetics.
This is an example of what Dr. Martin Blaser, a physician/scientist at NYU calls "The modern plagues" resulting from "antibiotic winter". The way we live, what we eat, how we abuse antibiotics (not just at the Dr. office but also in agriculture) are changing the biodiversity of our microbes in such a dramatic, and permanent way, that as a population, we are now far more susceptible to poor outcomes. Dr. Blaser wrote about this years ago, and we watched an example of it happen in real time during COVID. His focus is on the antibiotic side of this story, but diet plays a critical role as well.
When I teach human microbiome I and use a book that he wrote about: "Missing Microbes". It's a good read and explains the science underlying these outcomes in a really accessible way.
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- is a c-section or traditional birth the 'best'?
- are established shots 'better' than unvaccinated?
- is formula or breast milk 'best' and how is that even measured in a controlled study?
- are any packaged beginner foods healthy or is it all worse than home prepped first foods for babies/toddlers?
Do these changed microbes just sit there and not do what they are supposed to do?...or what is the fundamental difference between them and what we would ideally have?