All of us know for a fact that our body determines how it digests the food we eat. But this is only one side of the coin. The other side is more interesting: What we eat tells our bodies how to digest.
When you eat a cheese cake on your birthday, how you digest and metabolize that cheese cake is determined by your friends within your gut – your gut microbes. These gut microbes helps with the absorption of dietary fats, allowing the host to extract more calories from the same amount of food. Your gut microbes play vital role in how you metabolize the diet.
What we eat tells our bodies how to digest it.
Recent research shows that the abundance of this friendly bacteria in the gut was actually influenced by our bodies’ diet. Not only that, a diet rich in fat promotes the growth of these fat-loving bacteria, resulting in more fat absorption. So, each time you eat a diet rich in fat, your fat-loving gut microbes grow in number, which results in more fat absorption. As these fat-loving bacteria establish a firm niche in your gut, all you need is a small amount of fat-rich foods to extract a lot more calories. This new information seems to explain why obese people need to work much harder to curb fat absorption from diet.
The bottom-line: No two people extract the same number of calories from the same food they consume. The next time you read the calorie-count on packaged food, keep in mind that the calories you extract vary from person to person, based on how each of our gut microflora processes the food we eat. Think about it!
Each time you eat a diet rich in fat, your fat-loving gut microbes grow in number, which results in more fat absorption. As these fat-loving bacteria establish a firm niche in your gut, all you need is a small amount of fat-rich foods to extract a lot more calories. This new information seems to explain why obese people need to work much harder to curb fat absorption from diet.
Human Ecosystem from Genetic Science Learning Center on Vimeo.
