Obesity and Diabetes – Is Your Gut in Control?

August 28, 2015 by

Aug. 21, 2015

By Medical Discovery News

Your body is like a forest, providing a home to microscopic flora and fauna. In fact, your body is home to up to 100 times more microbes than your own cells, which make up your microbiome. While we provide them residence, these microbes help us out by providing a first line of defense against disease trying to invade our bodies, even breaking down food during digestion and producing vitamins. Now, the microbes that live in the digestive tract are helping us understand diabetes better.

According to the Human Microbiome Project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the microbiome plays a huge role in human health. When the microbiome is altered or imbalanced, it can cause conditions like obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, skin disease, urogenital infection, allergy, and can even affect emotion and behavior.

Recently, scientists from Israel discovered another surprising effect of the microbiome while investigating the use of artificial sweeteners in relation to glucose intolerance and diabetes. Artificial sweeteners such as saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame are commonly used in weight loss strategies because they do not add calories while still satisfying sweet cravings. However, artificial sweeteners are not always effective in managing weight and glucose, and scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science may have figured out why.

Through experimentation they observed that adding artificial sweeteners to the diets of mice caused significant metabolic changes, including increasing blood sugar levels more than mice fed regular sugar. It didn’t matter whether the mouse was obese or at a normal weight, they all reacted the same. Dietary changes can alter the populations of bacteria in our guts, so the study addressed whether those changes affected blood glucose levels as well. After being treated with saccharin for nine days, the populations of gut bacteria in the mice shifted dramatically and corresponded with an increase in their glycemic index. Specifically, the bacterial group Bacteroidetes increased while the group Clostridiales decreased. These changes in bacterial populations is associated with obesity in mice and people.

When they administered antibiotics to reverse this and return the bacterial populations to a healthy state, it also countered the effects of saccharin, returning glucose levels to normal. To take it a step further, researchers took feces from saccharin-consuming mice showing glucose intolerance and transplanted them into other mice that had never consumed saccharin. Remarkably, those mice started showing signs of glucose intolerance.

In a study of 400 people, those who consumed artificial sweeteners had a gut microbiome that was vastly different from those who did not. They had a group of people consume high levels of artificial sweeteners for seven days, and like the rats their glucose levels increased and their microbiomes changed.

Overall, these studies show that artificial sweeteners may induce glucose intolerance instead of preventing it due to the intimate connection between the bacteria that live in our digestive systems and our metabolic state. In the future, expect to see diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that utilize our microbial friends.

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How Clean is Too Clean?

November 1, 2014 by

Oct. 31, 2014

By Medical Discovery News

Cleaning supplies

Common knowledge and previous studies generally agree that children who grow up in the inner city and are exposed to mouse allergens, roach allergens, and air pollutants are more likely to develop asthma and allergies. But a recent study adds a new twist – children exposed to these substances in their first year of life actually had lower rates of asthma and allergies. However, if these allergens were first encountered after age one, this protective effect did not exist.

Another study parallels this one, concluding that children growing up on farms also have lower allergy and asthma rates. Scientists argue that farm children are regularly exposed to microbes and allergens at an early age, leading to this same protective effect.

Asthma is the most common chronic condition among children. One in five Americans, or 60 million people, has asthma and allergies. In the industrialized world, allergic diseases have been on the rise for more than 50 years. Worldwide, 40-50 percent of school-age children are sensitive to one or more common allergens.

In this study, scientists enrolled 467 children from the inner cities of Baltimore, Boston, New York City, and St. Louis and followed their health since birth. The infants were tested for allergies and wheezing by periodic blood tests, skin-prick tests, and physical exams, and their parents were surveyed. They also sampled and analyzed the allergens and dust in the homes of over 100 of the subjects.

Children who lived in home environments that included cat and mouse dander as well as cockroach droppings in their first year of life were much less likely to develop wheezing or allergies when compared to children who were not exposed to these substances. This protective effect was additive, so children exposed to all three were less likely to develop wheezing compared to children exposed to two, and those children were more protected than those who were exposed to only one. Only 17 percent of children who lived in homes with all three allergens experienced wheezing by age three, compared to 51 percent of children who lived in homes without such allergens. Interestingly, dog dander did not have a protective effect against the development of allergies or wheezing.

The richness of the bacterial populations children were exposed to enhanced this protective effect. This suggests that household pests may be the source of some of the beneficial bacteria in the inner city environment. Early exposure to allergens and certain bacteria together provide the greatest effect.

An infant’s microbiome, the total makeup of bacteria in and on their bodies, is developed during their first year of life. The bacteria colonizing an infant’s gastrointestinal system affects their immune system and influences the development of allergies. Scientists hypothesize that something similar may be happening in the airways and lungs, as kids with asthma have altered bacterial populations in their respiratory systems.

There is mounting evidence exposures to allergens and bacteria in the first few months of life help shape the respiratory health of children. But we don’t yet know how specific allergens and bacteria induce this protective effect, or how they can be used to treat children and reduce their chances of developing allergies and asthma.

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Putting Your Bacteria to Work

April 4, 2014 by

April 4, 2014

By Medical Discovery News

A biotech startup company called uBiome has adopted the concept of crowd sourcing, using the Internet to rally people around a cause, for research on the human microbiome. The microbiome is all the microscopic flora and fauna that live in and on the human body. Humans have 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells. But science is just beginning to understand the populations of the microbiome and how they affect a person’s health for good or bad.

What science already knows about the microbiome comes from the $173 million government-funded Human Microbiome Project (HMP). This project took five years and collected and sequenced the microbiome of 250 healthy people. It proved there are at least 1,000 different types of bacteria present on every person. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made the four terabytes of data from this project available to all researchers via the Microbiome Cloud Project.

Different anatomical sites of the body have different microbial populations. Additionally, the microbial populations that inhabit our bodies vary from person to person, but are very stable within an individual. Each person has their own distinct microbial signature that is unique to them. Most of these microbial species are actually helpful and protect against invading microbes that can cause disease. Some, like certain E. coli in the gut, actually produce essential vitamins that keep us healthy. Alterations in the human microbiome have been associated with diseases like autism, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, and asthma. In some cases, correcting microbial populations associated with disease states may cure or help manage the disease.

A startup company called uMicrobiome is looking to sequence the microbiomes of at least 1,000 more people from all over the world, and they are trying to find volunteers using crowd sourcing. Anyone interested can go to the company’s Web site (ubiome.com), make a pledge, and request a sampling kit, which contains a swab for gently brushing areas of the ears, mouth, genitalia, or gastrointestinal tract. The swabs are placed into a solution that preserves and stabilizes the bacteria for transport back to the lab.

uMicrobiome examines samples for their 16S RNA sequences. These sequences are present in all microbes, but part of the sequence is unique to each different bacterium. This technology of DNA sequencing can determine the different types of bacteria present and their proportions in each sample.

The company puts the results on their Web site for individuals to access and analyze their microbiome. There are also software tools to help users interpret what they are seeing. uMicrobiome secures the data so that it cannot released in an identifiable form. A person can choose to share their data with other citizen scientists for scientific studies or compare their microbiome to others’.

So science to the citizens has arrived! Anyone can learn about their own microbial world and advance this field of science as well. 

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Weight Loss Microbe

October 6, 2013 by

Oct. 4, 2013

By Medical Discovery News

John Donne said, “No man is an island.” Scientists would agree – man is more like a forest. And just like the flora and fauna that call the forest home, each human body houses tons of other species in the form of microbes. In fact, most people have 10 times more microbes in and on them than their own cells! These microscopic organisms live on skin, within the gastrointestinal tract, and inside mouths, helping the human body function and keeping it healthy. Now, new research shows that a certain microbe has huge influence on a person’s weight.

Science is just beginning to understand how the relationship between microbes and human cells, tissues, and organs contributes to good health. The key here is mutualism – the cooperation that benefits both the microbes and the human.

Disruption of the relationship of a person’s microbiome can lead to problems. For example, oral antibiotics can upset the microbiome in the gut, resulting in the discomfort some people experience while taking them. While antibiotics are made to be effective against specific types of bacteria, they also disrupt the normal population of bacteria in the intestinal tract. The types and amount of necessary bacteria here are altered. This results in major changes to the interaction between bacteria and cells lining the gut, much to a person’s dismay and inconvenience.

A recent study shows that a bacterium in the intestines appears to control diet-mediated obesity.  Akkermansia muciniphila is a common resident of the human gut, living in the layer of mucus that coats the surface of the intestinal tract. In a healthy person, this bacterium can be 3-5 percent of all the bacteria present – that’s a lot. The amount of Akkermansia muciniphila in a person’s intestinal tract is highly correlated with their weight. That is, people with low numbers of Akkermansia muciniphila are more likely to be obese and have type II diabetes, and those with high numbers are more likely to have a healthy weight.

To figure out this connection, researchers used mice that were fed either a normal diet or a high fat diet and monitored the number of different bacteria in their guts. As expected, mice fed the high fat diet became obese, but their levels of Akkermansia muciniphila were 100 times lower than mice fed the normal diet. Furthermore, when the obese mice on the high fat diet were also given this bacterium, they lost weight and lowered the incidence of diabetes.

This has some remarkable implications and possibilities for future therapies. This interplay between bacterial populations and the host can prevent some major human health issues, like obesity or diabetes. Perhaps Akkermansia muciniphila will soon be an ingredient in probiotics and yogurts and start a new weight-loss trend.

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