We're slowly coming to understand that antibiotics are very unkind to our gut flora and are a prime suspect in subsequent weight gain. Post-antibiotic diet could be a critical intervention to keep patients from falling into the grasp of obesity.<p>A NY Times article earlier this year gives a background on how the rise of antibiotics has been accompanied by a rise in weight among animals and humans alike:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-drug.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru...</a><p>Kids in particular seem to be at risk. A recent study of 64,000 kids has associated repeated antibiotic exposure before age 2 with early childhood obesity:<p><a href="http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1909801" rel="nofollow">http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=19098...</a><p>It's good we're investigating diet-based therapy, so patients can someday hear their doctors say "after finishing this broad-spectrum antibiotic prescription, you [or your child] should eat like this for this amount of time to restore digestive health."
Given the evident link between gut bacteria and mental health, it may be that we'll see diet as a component of psychiatric care in the future.<p>(<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscientists-1.16316" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscienti...</a>)
Eh, as a researcher at the periphery of the Human Microbiome Project and American Gut project this has been the accepted (and already shown, experimentally) conclusion for quite some time.
Study seems to follow common-sense - change the nutrients ingested and different gut bacteria will flourish.<p>What I'm really interested in is which types of bacteria create a feedback loop by releasing chemicals/hormones to increase hunger or cravings for specific foods. Definitely not an easy thing to determine given all the variables, but it seems very likely based on the other studies showing bacteria can promote fat or thin mice: <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-help-make-us-fat-and-thin/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...</a>
Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot, or there is a connection with bacteria population?
This complements other research that has been done on gut bacteria across cultures -- in different places we humans eat different prevailing diets:<p><a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/09/three-nations-divided-by-common-gut-bacteria/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/0...</a><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-microbiome/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micro...</a><p>The second link is particularly interesting, as the Hadza hunter-gatherers have a lot of gut bacteria that cause disease in the west. So it seems that gut bacteria aren't the whole story. Something to complicate the story for people who want to cure mental illness or create skinny people via manipulating gut bacteria.
Can someone speak to my theory (that's based on limited knowledge), that if we wanted to "reset" the gut, we could deliberately take antibiotics to wipe out good/bad colonies of microbes and tailor a hyper-specific diet for sought after results. The hypothesis being that if certain microbes flourish for years and that if it is impractical to genetically map the gut biome to identify which are thriving in every patient, this could help us get to a clean slate before therapy is attempted.
So do we know yet what sort of diet cultivates a microflora biome that encourages healthy weight loss? I'm asking for a friend...<p>It's easy to find diets for losing weight in general, but I'm curious if we know enough to create a diet to make a microflora composition that can help the weight loss process along. I keep seeing mentions of the microflora factor influencing weight gain, so I'm assuming there's a way to cultivate it to help with loss as well.
It would be interesting to hear both why the chose a "high fat-high sugar" diet and to see further research that did more isolated tests in the vein of "high carb", "high fat" and "high protein" instead of combinations of them. Also, what are the implications of altered gut makeup after adopting these diets? Surely we could come up with experiments to measure metabolism and behavior as a result of the altered gut bacteria.<p>It will be fascinating to see how our understanding of nutrition and diet changes as science finally catches up. Studies like this are just the beginning.
I know that antibiotics are a significant factor in the loss of gut bacteria, but another factor is all of the preservatives that pervade the manufactured food most people eat every day. I've often wondered what percentage of the loss is from these substances.
Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.