[nectar_dropcap]I[/nectar_dropcap]t was once believed that eating fat made you fat. So, food producers poured sugar by the ton into their products to replace the fat resulting in the highest rate of type 2 diabetes in human history. However, it turned out that the Harvard scientists who said this had just been paid off by the sugar companies. So then the real enemy, sugar, took first place in the firing line. And rightly so.

If only those greedy scientists knew that they could have quite easily have covered themselves. Covered themselves and their gut in Nutella and then proven that it was actually the gut bacteria that had the final call in a person’s susceptibility to weight gain; allowing those sneaky researchers to just shimmy their way out of court and into an early Nobel laureate retirement.

Unfortunately for them, it was a different group of scientist that established this by inserting the faeces from female twins of different weight (one obese and one lean) into mice. It was to be a groundbreaking study.

The mice were absent of any microbes in their gut, so they were influenced by the human faeces microbes only. Astonishingly, the mice with the obese twins poo rapidly grew an appetite and gained weight, whilst the other mice with the lean twins poo just remained the same weight.

A further study similar to this involved a measurement of how many calories were in the participant’s poo after eating the same foods, finding those that remained lean had a higher number of calories in their faeces than those that gained weight. So basically, different people absorb more or fewer calories when eating the exact same foods…

Why?

Because of bacteria called Firmicutes. Your primitive caveman ancestor would love these as they are impressively efficient at extracting energy from fat, aiding winter survival.

However, ironically, with high-fat western diets, they certainly make us firm but perhaps not so cute. Imagine a junkie came to your house and asked you for some crack. Would you give it to him? Hopefully not, that shits expensive and he would probably bring his crack-loving friends next time thus demanding more crack.

But this is exactly what happens every time you eat junk food. Eating fatty fast food feeds the bacteria that gain most from it (e.g. Firmicutes). They then become more abundant and use their dominance to secrete signals that tell you to eat more junk food.

So the bottom line is:

Feed junk(ies) food loving microbes = more junk(ies) food loving microbes = more demand for crack junk food.

This equation makes them prosper and dominate your gut whilst reducing healthy diversity and suppressing more beneficial bacteria like…

Akkermansia muciniphila.

A ‘good’ bacteria that are so great that they come in bold and italics.

Akkermansia has strong ties with leanness and lives in most people but usually in very low numbers. Which is unfortunate as Dr. Patrice Cani (who conducted a study on Akkermansia’s ties with obesity), states:

“Patients who exhibited higher amounts of Akkermansia [in their gut] were the patients who had a very strong improvement in cholesterol, in glycemia, in waist-to-hip ratio and also a reduction in different parameters in both cardiovascular disease and risk factors.”

Sounds good right? The best part is, your gut microbes are totally malleable. They respond 100% to what you feed them. And they love fibre.

Liken it to having your own personal farmyard… in your gut. To keep cows and goats happily producing milk, you must feed and take care of them right? There’s no difference with your gut farm ‘animals’. Like cows, ‘good’ bacteria love fibrous foods, e.g. onions, leeks, garlic, asparagus, and bananas. You should feed them about 30 grams a day. A personal favorite of theirs is inulin. It’s a fantastic fibre that you can’t break down but your microbes can, and when doing so they release butyrate. Butyrate is great because of the boatload of studies that suggest its powerful anti-inflammatory effects in the gut. Additionally, Inulin enhances calcium absorption for improved bone health whilst reducing the risk of heart disease by lowering blood triglyceride levels.

However, to put it in perspective, there are only 2 grams of fibre in an onion and 3 grams in a banana. Which means you would have to eat either 15 onions or 10 bananas in a day to reach the RDA of fibre. No wonder 97% of Americans are deficient.

Personally, I found a cheat. Because I’m lazy and poor, instead of buying a ton of Jerusalem artichokes (the highest inulin content of all foods), I just bought pure inulin powder. I then add 5g of this powder to a protein shake after gym. It’s certainly not as good as eating 5g of inulin in vegetable form, but it’s still better than nothing, and I do this twice a day meaning I get an additional 10g of fibre to supplement the 20g that most people in the UK are already getting.

In the future, it’s quite possible that you will be considering an additional pseudo-food group; alongside dairy, meat, and fruit. But not for yourself… instead for your gut. In fact, let’s invent this now and call the new food group BacterBros; with some sort of cheesy jingle like, “Feed them nutritious stew. Nourish them and they’ll nourish you. Then you’ll both flourish through“.

However, you can’t resurrect what’s not there. That’s like opening a brothel within a sacred gated community and expecting hordes of locals to appear.

It’s not gonna happen.

Unless however, you introduce a whole new village of whiskey sippin’ drunkards with more money than secularism sense.

Which leads me neatly into the insertion of a stranger’s poo inside of you. Or faecal microbiota transfer (FMT) for short.

This method enables the transfer of microbiota from a healthy donor directly into your gut and is dramatically becoming popular in medicine.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year found 94% of patients were cured of a Clostridium difficile infection using FMT, whilst a course of antibiotics cured just 31%. There was such a difference that the researchers stopped the trial early, deciding it was unethical to deny the better cure (FMT) to the participants on antibiotics.

It works by surrounding the pathogenic bacteria in the gut with good bacteria that outcompete for resources. For the faint-hearted, a poo pill containing freeze-dried faeces is available, best consumed from those who assure you that their shit doesn’t stink.

If you think this method is limited to only those unwell then you’ve got another thing coming. Let me introduce you to Personalised Nutrition.

The basis is, different people react differently to the same foods (e.g. Pasta may cause blood sugar to skyrocket in some but remain normal in others). So with this information and a very complex algorithm, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science can analyse your poo to tell you what foods you react best to based on your gut microbes; with alarming accuracy, results show.

For example, your faeces may indicate that you are low in Bifidobacteria, and research shows that seaweed and gold-fleshed kiwis increase numbers of Bifidobacteria in the gut.

Bifidobacteria are great as they help extract nutrients from food for you and suppress the cause of weight gaining bacteria such as firmicutes.

So after taking part, you could then expect to receive a rundown of the bacterial composition within you and what to do/eat in order to improve it depending on your goals (e.g. weight loss).

The best part? You can take part for FREE!! Providing that you: fit the requirements, travel to Israel, and then give the researchers your blood and crap for far too many times than it is normal to give a stranger these bodily fluids; which is zero, zero times is normal. But hey the sickos get paid for your this shit so whatever.

Do you ever find that just thinking about cake makes you gain 20 pounds? Well for that you can now blame your parents. Studies have found some freakishly accurate correlations between those who were born by c-section, weren’t breastfed and took antibiotics as babies with being overweight later in adulthood. These 3 things cause a lack of diversity in your gut microbiome as you don’t get any mum poo in your gut during childbirth, then none gets passed to you in the breast milk, and for those good microbes that do find a way to worm their way inside of you Jimmy Saville style, the antibiotics then obliterate them leaving you near bug-less.

#getkidsbugged

But how does it affect your brain??? Find out here in PART 2!

#takecarenotantibiotics