Bacteria living in people's large intestine may slow down the
activity of the "good" kind of fat tissue, a special fat that quickly
burns calories and may help prevent obesity, scientists are reporting in
a new study. The discovery, published in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research,
could shed light on ways to prevent obesity and promote weight loss,
including possible microbial and pharmaceutical approaches, the authors
said.
Sandrine P. Claus, Jeremy K. Nicholson and colleagues explain that
trillions of bacteria live in the large intestine of healthy people,
where they help digest food and make certain vitamins. In recent years,
however, scientists have realized that these bacteria do more — they
interact with the rest of the body in ways that affect the use of energy
and its storage as fat and finely tune the immune system. Claus and
Nicholson decided to see how intestinal bacteria might affect the
activity of brown fat. The "good" fat that burns calories quickly before
they can be stored as fat, brown fat exists in small deposits in the
neck area and elsewhere — not like "white fat" in flab around the waist
and buttocks. No one had checked to see if those bacteria could have an
effect on brown fat, the researchers noted.
In experiments that compared "germ-free" (GF) mice, which don't have
large-intestine bacteria, and regular mice, the scientists uncovered
evidence suggesting that the bacteria do influence the activity of brown
fat. Brown fat in the GF mice seemed to be more active, burning
calories faster than in regular mice. Large-intestine bacteria also
seemed to be linked with gender differences in weight. Normal male mice
were heavier and fattier than females, but those differences vanished in
the GF mice. The research also uncovered major differences in the
interactions between males and females and their intestinal bacteria
that might help explain why the obesity epidemic is more serious and
rapidly developing in women. Those and other findings may point the way
toward approaches that kick-up the activity of brown fat in humans to
prevent or treat obesity.
