The New Yorker had solid overview -- i.e., "how much we know about how little we know" -- of the gut microbiome in 2012: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/germs-are-us" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/germs-are-us</a><p>The calories-in, calories-out crowd isn't wrong thermodynamically speaking (I am fairly certain!), but an important component of that is how many calories are being taken-up by bacteria and how many are passed through without being utilized. If my gut sucks up 20% more calories from the same food as someone else, I'm going to have a harder time managing my weight than he/she will... even if we eat and 'move' at precisely the same amounts.
Candid question : Is gut bacteria (in terms of variety, strains, etc) affected by diet? Foods like kefir or some yogurts are known to influence the bacterial fauna, so just wondering.
Do people who don't eat sugar ever have a problem with being overweight? I stopped eating sugar 18 months ago to help my sinuses (it worked), and as a side effect lost about 30 pounds. Basically my appetite shrunk. I wasn't even trying to lose weight, it just happened.
I even wonder if there could be some simple questionnaire about their parents heredity directly suggesting people to eat whatever could help their gut bacteria.<p>Also I've read that the gut bacteria is not very well understood (hard to reproduce in a lab).
anybody know what affordable glucose-monitoring devices can measure glucose responses at 5 minute intervals ? Would love to get my hands on one of those to test personal hypotheses
What if it recommends me food that I don't like? What if cafeteria only offers non-compliant food on some days? What if I go to a party? What if I eat out with other people?
"We all know the friend who eats what they want and is thin" - No, we don't. You can turn fat pretty much any person who is not suffering from serious metabolic disorders. If you think you've found an outlier who can eat, pick a random number here.. 6000 calories every day and still stay thin then you've probably found a genetic freak. Certainly such a person should be examined to see what genetic variations allow them to do that.
Sidenote: This was figured out ~4000 years in the PAST according to Ayurveda(edit: and TCM as the cultures were sharing information), its documented in Sanskrit texts which themselves were recorded after only millennia of oral tradition
Well that doesn't make sense... calories in, calories out, thermodynamics, it's as simple as that, right?!?<p>Edit: Seems I've inadvertently demonstrated Poe's Law...