Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
From: Medical News Today.com
US researchers who transplanted human intestinal microbes into germ-free mice and then switched their diet from a low-fat plant-based one to a more Westernized diet, high in fat and sugars, found that within one day obesity-linked microbes were thriving in the gut and the mice eventually became obese.
The study was the work of Dr Jeffrey I Gordon and colleagues and was published on 11 November in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Gordon, the senior author of the study, is director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.
Gordon and colleagues wrote how over time, compared with mice kept on a low-fat, plant-based diet, the “humanized” mice fed the Westernized high-fat, high-sugar diet diet became obese, and that their weight gain patterns followed shifts in the types of bacteria present in their gut.
