Up until now, we have been brought up to believe that many of our physical traits such as shape (thinness or chubbiness), height, proneness for metabolic illnesses, kidney stones or gout were all decided by either our genes that we inherit from our parents, or the environment in which we live and eat!
A startling new discovery is now pointing to yet another “third” factor, something that that we could not have imagined five years ago!
Let us start with a simple observation. We know that fatness, or obesity, for example, runs in families. It is therefore reasonable to assume that this trait got passed down from overweight parents to one or more children through “genes”. To explain why some sibs had more fat than others we invoked additional environmental factors such as gluttonous consumption of fatty and starchy food and perhaps a sedentary or lazy life style.
But when you look around with greater scrutiny you often come across someone who seems a “one-off” in the family: the only person there to be obese, for example.
It is then that scientists started exploring other ways that could explain why with parents and sibs seemingly shapely and fit, and he himself not being a voracious eater, he should become a “one-off” obese?
The answer came from an experiment carried out in rats: stool was collected from a few obese rats and inserted into the intestines of thin rats. A few weeks down, the thin rats actually became obese!!
This finding initially appeared too startling to believe, and triggered a large number of experiments that proved how traits (phenotypes) could be passed from one to another through microbes that colonise our gut.
We carry a few trillion germs in our body, mostly in the gut (intestines) collectively referred to as Gut Microbiota (GM). They are “commensals” or friendly germs…that protect us from invasive harmful germs, help us digest certain foods, manufacture some vitamins, and help us maintain a healthy metabolic balance (homeostasis).
Each one of us has a unique “signature” GM. When this “friendly” relationship gets disturbed, say due to use of antibiotics or invasion by harmful germs, our metabolism goes for a toss, and we hurl down in different directions, be it with regard to weight fluctuations, other metabolic functions or even moods.
Faecal Microbiota Transfer (Faecal transplant), where stools collected from healthy donors are transferred to the intestines of human patients with certain diseases like difficult-to-treat Clostridium difficile infections and ulcerative colitis, is already in use. So intense has been this revelation, that GM has become a billion dollar industry, each laboratory trying to discover and market an “antidote” probiotic to treat a specific disorder.
And attempts are on to bring out a “poop pill” that would transfer a specific trait from a donor to an aspiring recipient from shedding excess fat, to preventing kidney stones, to even managing anger!
Cultivating a good army of gut microbes and keeping them in good humor could pay enormous dividends.
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