Amazingly you can find millions of microbes, fungi and bacteria in your gut. They are essential to digestion and keeping our bodies in good health.

Shifts in the microbial environment of the digestive tract, or bacteria in the gut, are worthy of more attention according to Washington University researchers, perhaps providing clues to overall health as well as treatments for obesity and ways to fight malnutrition. Until now, this area has been largely unexplored.

“Although how much you eat and how much you exercise are dominant drivers of your energy balance, it’s possible that microbial communities and how they work also comprise a factor that determines your risk for obesity or risk for malnutrition,” explains senior study author and genome scientist Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon, director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine.

Think about this. There are ten times more microbes in adult human bodies than there are human cells - meaning in numbers, we’re 90% microbe, 10% human. For every one human cell, there are ten microbes.

From a very early age, our bodies are home to a large and ever changing community of microorganisms, most of them live in our intestines.

No one knows how many species of microbes exist in the human digestive tract - the last count was stopped at 395 different species from just three healthy subjects.

Bacteria that reside in the digestive tract are there to help you digest and absorb nutrients, as well as play a role in your immune function and act as a barrier to infection.

The digestive system is a highly complex environment, affected by genetic and cultural factors that also affect digestion and obesity.

To find a better way to study these microbes, Gordon and his team created a well defined, representative animal model, a mouse genetically altered to have no gut microbes of its own; into which the team transplanted fresh or frozen adult human fecal microbes.

When the “humanized” mice were switched from a low fat to a junk food diet (high in fat with plenty of simple sugars) the structure of the microbial community changed quite a bit, and quickly too.

Within 24 hours not only did the species of bacteria change, but the proportions of species changed too. Of course the mice became obese on their mock Western diet.

What’s more surprising is that, transplanting the microbes to another set of microbe-free mice caused them to put on weight, even though these guys were on a low fat feeding plan.

The microbes also appear to pass between generations, so a mother could give her set of microbes to her child.

Gordon and his team suggest that it may be some of us have digestive microbes that are more efficient at getting energy from food than those of others.

So that 110 calories cup of Cheerios offers you the full amount of energy, while another person might get less - depending on the microbes in their own digestive tract. So, bacteria in your gut may explain why some of us gain weight eating a certain way, while others remain pin thin on the same eating plan.

The experts hope that perhaps one day medications might be made up of microbes, or drugs that target some sets of them, to change how bacteria in your gut work. This could have implications not only for obesity, but for the opposite end of the spectrum, fighting malnutrition. Naturally there’s still a lot of work to get there.

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