I am trying to get rid of 30 pounds (down 10 already) and am doing so by cutting carbohydrates - a difficult task as I love pasta and rice and beans - these are a staple of my diet.
I have also been following research in gut flora with great delight - proactivley maintaining a good culture and have seen marked improvements in my health and well-being. I used to suffer from Acid Reflux and that has gone away completely. I am also sleeping a lot better. What drove this point home is that I recently had to take a course of antibiotics for a wound on my foot and the reflux came right back.
Also, switched to diet sodas (Aspartame) and now it turns out that these can cause problems. From Ars Technica comes word of this new paper at Nature (paywalled):
Artificial sweeteners may leave their users glucose intolerant
People who are watching their weight will often opt for a diet soda, reasoning that the fewer calories, the better. But the availability of drinks and foods made with artificial sweeteners like saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame hasn't seemed to help much with our booming obesity levels. Now, some researchers might have identified a reason for this: the sweeteners leave their users with elevated blood glucose levels. But they don't seem to act directly on human metabolism. Instead, the effects come through alterations in the bacterial populations that live inside us.
The paper that describes this work, which was performed by a large collaboration of researchers from Israel, is being released by Nature today. The researchers note that epidemiological studies about the effects of artificial sweeteners have produced mixed results; some show a benefit, while others indicate that they're associated with weight gain and diabetes risk. Given that human populations haven't given us a clear answer, the researchers turned to mice, where they could do a carefully controlled study.
And the experiment and findings:
The authors wondered whether the gut bacteria might be acting as intermediaries between the artificial sweeteners and the glucose response. Their first test of this idea was simply to wipe out the bacteria with a heavy dose of antibiotics. When they did so, the difference between the animals getting glucose and the animals getting artificial sweeteners vanished. To really nail down the case, the authors obtained fecal material from the mice given artificial sweeteners and transferred it to mice that had been treated with antibiotics. The mice receiving the transplants showed reduced tolerance to glucose.
Could this really be relevant to human health? To get a hint, the team got seven healthy volunteers to start consuming high levels of saccharin (the FDA's recommended maximum daily dose). At the end of a week, four of them ended up with a reduced insulin response. Again, the researchers took stool samples and gave them to germ-free mice. Fecal transplants from those who had a poor insulin response transferred this response to the mice; fecal transplants from the ones who were unaffected by the saccharine had no effect.
There is a nice discussion in the 190+ comments - seems a lot of people are checking out this pathway.
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