A resource for health professionals, parents, teachers, counselors & kids on the childhood obesity epidemic.

We left off with some of the questions that scientists were presented with in the course of learning more about the microbiome. Research showed that obese and lean people have different-size populations of various bacteria residing in their GI tracts, but right from the start it was also apparent that many other factors play a part.

For instance, the typical obese lab mouse has, overall, a paltry assortment of gut flora compared to the spectacularly diverse community that a lean mouse can boast of. Questions continued to arise. When the microbiome becomes altered, is it because of the inadequate diet? Or are the harmful changes indirect, caused by conditions created by obesity?

A team of Israeli scientists determined that microbes that thrive on artificial sweeteners are the same kind that other researchers had already found in excessive amounts, in the interiors of genetically obese mice. In recent years, many serious autoimmune conditions have been identified as emanating from chronic systemic inflammation, which originates in exactly one place, the gut.

Staphylococcus aureus and E. coli are both life forms that, for some reason, trigger human fat cells into producing inflammatory substances that irritate other cells and incidentally invite diabetes. Researchers have observed…

[…] a connection between certain types of bacteria and body fat that produces a heightened inflammatory response and drives the inflammatory process.

And then they found out about AD-36, the human adenovirus that apparently plays the dirty trick of changing adult stem cells into fat cells. More theories were proposed and more experiments designed.

At the University of Geneva, researchers kept mice very cold for as long as 10 days. Their inner bacterial universes adapted to the new reality. Some bug species prospered, while others failed to thrive.

When these hardy critters were transplanted into mice that had been intentionally engineered to have no microbiota of their own, the transplanted bugs helpfully facilitated the formation of more brown fat, and the recipient mice lost weight.

In the words of journalist Megan Thielking, the findings…

[…] suggested that harnessing the way cold changes the microbes in your body — and, consequently, the way you metabolize food — could be a potential avenue for fighting obesity.

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned Dr. Lara R. Dugas before. A physical activity epidemiologist, she has suggested redesigning the traditional school year because under the present system kids leave for the summer in relatively good shape and then slouch back to classes in the fall all bloated and misshapen.

The worst victims of this phenomenon are girls in the low-income and minority demographics. The NIH.gov website says of a study where Dr. Dugas was lead author:

A newly identified factor, the gut microbiota, which is a bacterial ecosystem residing within the gastrointestinal tract of humans, has now been implicated in the obesity epidemic. Importantly, this bacterial community is impacted by external environmental factors through a variety of undefined mechanisms.

In other words, just a year ago, the existence of our three or four pounds of bugs, constituting a separate and discrete organ, was still being referred to as a “newly identified factor.” And today, the microbiome’s mechanisms are not much better defined or understood than they were last July.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Regulation of Appetite, Satiation, and Body Weight by Enteroendocrine Cells,” Karger.com, February 2015
Source: “Artificial Sweeteners May Change Our Gut Bacteria in Dangerous Ways,” ScientificAmerican.com, 03/17/15
Source: “Chronic Inflammation: How Majority Of Inflammatory Diseases Start In Your Gut,” Reset.me, 11/21/15
Source: “The Truth about Freezing your Fat Off,” TheWeek.com, 01/08/16
Source: “The obese gut microbiome across the epidemiologic transition,” NIH.gov, 01/11/16
Photo credit: Global Panorama via Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

The accumulated information about the microbiome grows every day. The bugs that colonize us have a lot going on, and figuring them out is tricky, because many of them can’t even be cultivated in a laboratory.

It is useful to compare our microbiome knowledge to an old-fashioned connect-the-dots puzzle. A lot of things seem to be in contact with each other, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Then, suddenly, with the last couple of lines drawn, everything falls into place and the picture is clear. We haven’t come to that part yet.

Study of the microbiome can also be compared to how, millennia ago, shepherds stared up at the night sky, connected the starry dots, and saw pictures. Sometimes, a person only needs to look at it from the correct angle, and it all clicks. Research hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

What we do know, is that the bugs have been implicated in everything from autism to chronic pain and obesity. Today we go back and pick up on some of the dots that may not yet be perfectly connected, but which show tantalizing promise.

The earlier microbiome research

In 2008, the idea that the microbiome could influence energy storage was not new. Researchers devised experiments to show that overweight is often preceded by “aberrant compositional development of the gut microbiota,” and they carefully considered the applicability of any discoveries to the child obesity problem in particular.

When an unwelcome intruder tries to gain power by creating artificial hunger, that is certainly obesity-related. A decade ago, many academics had already begun to wonder if our gut flora are secretly running our lives. The GI tract commonly contains both bacteria and yeast, and it is part of both their jobs to keep each other under control. When the candida organism reaches critical mass, everything goes haywire and anxiety becomes chronic.

Steven Kotler wrote:

This happens because, when the body is anxious it craves the fuel needed to react quickly to negative situations. Sugar breaks down fast, so sugar is what’s craved. But the reason the body is really craving sugar is because candida feeds on it. This means, at least under these circumstances, that your emotions are really just another’s hunger.

In 2012 a study came out with evidence that insufficient bacteria in the large intestine could slow down the burning of brown fat, and promote obesity, while other studies also suggested that the gut bacteria influence body weight in a number of other ways.

For instance, they digest complex carbohydrates for us, because we don’t have the right enzymes. The microbes transform these substances into fatty-acid molecules “whence they are fed into biochemical pathways that either liberate energy from them… or lay them down as fat.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Early differences in fecal microbiota composition in children may predict overweight,” AJCN.Nutrition.org, 2008
Source: “You Are Not You: The Conundrum of the ‘Me’,” PsychologyToday.com, 08/26/10
Source: “The gut microbiome: how does it affect our health?,” MedicalNewsToday.com, 03/11/15
Source: “Me, myself, us,” Economist.com, 08/18/12
Photo credit: whitney waller via Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Artificial sweeteners have been mentioned here before, but we haven’t gotten into how these substances affect our gut flora. The short answer is, not well.

For Scientific American, Ellen Ruppel Shell reported on the Israeli scientific team whose work with mice led them to describe a “cause-and-effect chain” leading from artificial sweeteners like saccharin to an adverse effect on our microbes, and then to obesity and diabetes in humans.

Shell wrote:

This study was not the first to note this link in animals, but it was the first to find evidence of a plausible cause: the sweeteners appear to change the population of intestinal bacteria that direct metabolism, the conversion of food to energy or stored fuel.

And that is the crux of the matter. The indications point to a need for people to be more cautious about messing around with the indwelling bugs, who are in a position to make our lives miserable. One thing these substances can do is cause a population explosion among “bacteria that make more calories available to us…” The relationship to obesity is obvious.

As always, others in the scientific community do not consider that a meaningful link has been proven. But more connections continue to appear.

Research scientist Meghan Azad, of the University of Manitoba, said:

Infants born to women who regularly consumed one or more artificially sweetened beverages during pregnancy were twice as likely to be overweight by 1 year of age.

Shell captured a pertinent quotation from New York University gastroenterologist Ilseung Cho:

A hormone is like a force multiplier — and if a change in our gut microbes has an impact on hormones that control eating, well, that would explain a lot.

Long “naughty” list

The microbiome has been found to detest many things: refined sugar, herbicides, pesticides, and genetically engineered foods. Statements like this one, from the Alliance for Natural Health, upset people:

The only published human feeding experiment revealed that genetic material inserted into GE soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. Even after we stop eating GE foods, we may still have the GE proteins produced continuously inside us.

The microbiota also suffer from — and rebel against — the presence of gluten; antibiotics as medicine or secondhand from animal additives; non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; chlorinated and fluoridated water; pollution; and stress. Again, there is a sizable overlap with the list of factors that are identified, to a greater or lesser extent, as obesity villains.

If Big Food is backing any gut flora research, in hopes of finding some foothold or advantage, the endeavor seems bound to disappoint. Studies of the microbiome, if honestly performed, could turn around and bite them, and they might wish they have left the subject alone. Because, so far, the evidence is strong that our friendly, helpful microbes don’t like junk food.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Artificial Sweeteners May Change Our Gut Bacteria in Dangerous Ways,” ScientificAmerican.com, 03/17/15
Source: “Artificial Sweeteners During Pregnancy May Make for Heavier Infants,” HealthDay.com, 05/09/16
Source: “Get to Know Your Microbiome for Health & Wellness,” CarpeVitaInc.com, 06/05/15
Source: “Genetically Engineered Food Alters Our Digestive Systems!,” ANH-USA.org, 05/31/11
Photo credit: frankieleon via Visualhunt/CC BY

On the wilder frontiers of child obesity studies, there seems to be a lot of willingness to accuse parents of a particular gender for the entire problem. One headline, for example, purported to reveal the “untold story” which is that working mothers are to blame.

Truth be told, a lot of women would probably rather not work outside their homes. Also, whether they hold down jobs by choice or by necessity, they would rather not be blamed for childhood obesity.

But Nicole M. King seems to have done just that, in a MercatorNet.com article. As editor of what is billed as “the United States’ leading journal of family-policy research,” she is very familiar with the field, and opined that…

[…] the commentators bewailing the upsurge in childhood obesity have been keeping strangely quiet about an important backstory: namely, the role of maternal employment in incubating the problem.

Citing a study conducted by three universities in the United Kingdom, she points out “certain patterns” that line up with the presence of dangerously overweight children. Actually, it’s one pattern — a mother who works outside the home, and does not have enough time to cook healthful from-scratch meals, and fills her kids up with fast-food junk instead.

King writes:

In the current academic environment, it would take rare intellectual courage to challenge the cultural patterns that have taken mothers out of the home…

This is kind of hard to follow. What “cultural patterns”? Families can no longer afford to live on one income. In any state in the union, a full-time minimum wage employee does not make enough money to rent a one-bedroom apartment — forget about supporting a family.

Moms thanklessly bring home the bacon

A person can “challenge the cultural pattern” all day long, but since it is less a cultural pattern than a hardcore economic necessity, there isn’t much point, unless the critic is prepared to dismantle the entire system. Otherwise, there is little progress to be made by casting blame. This blaming implies that working mothers are acting out some kind of fairy-tale princess fantasy, to the children’s detriment, rather than working long hours for inadequate pay to house, feed and clothe those children.

The debate has another facet. To indict mothers who work outside the home is to frame the whole question in a very U.S.-centric way. In Mexico, the second most obese country after America, the culture tends more toward women doing their money-making activities at home, or taking their kids to work. In other words, a great many Mexican mothers are not separated from their kids all day, yet the result is childhood obesity — just like in America where moms leave the house and go alone to their workplaces.

Middle Eastern countries actively discourage women, especially mothers, from working outside the home. Yet obesity is a problem. In Samoa, the female workforce participation rate is only 26%, yet Samoans are known to be large people.

A change

Some time later, King reported again on the parental blame issue, this time in the course of reviewing a piece which attributed the problem to socioeconomic status. King, who is more a proponent of family environment as a causative factor, seems to now see the male parents as the bad guys. “Missing fathers, swelling waistlines” is the pertinent phrase.

But Childhood Obesity News has recently said a lot about fathers, so will leave it there for now.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The untold story behind child obesity,” MercatorNet.com, 11/22/13
Source: “Countries Where Women Are Least Likely To Be In The Labor Force,” WorldAtlas.com, 03/13/17
Source: “Missing Fathers, Swelling Waistlines,” MercatorNet.com, 02/16/17
Photo credit: bialasiewicz/123RF Stock Photo

Childhood Obesity News looks at factors that may or may not impact the obesity epidemic. Today’s punchlines have a way of becoming tomorrow’s reality, and if there is an underlying macro-cause for the result that we call the obesity epidemic, it would be better to know about it.

At an international conference on Excellence in Pediatrics, professor of Human Nutrition from the University of Ulster Barbara Livingstone noted that science had identified more than 30 potential risk factors connected with childhood obesity, although admittedly only a few were at that point supported by solid evidence. Prof. Livingstone said that in many countries, the environment had become “obesogenic or obesity-causing.”

In 2014, University of Southern California researchers used data from a longitudinal (8 years) study of children living in proximity to freeways and other major roads, and of kids living with secondhand cigarette smoke. In either case, the children had a greater chance of becoming obese later. Some of the subjects fulfilled both categories, and they were “even more likely to experience weight gain than those who were exposed to only one — or to neither.”

Journalist Lecia Bushak reported for Medical Daily:

A recent study out of Brigham Young University, for example, found that secondhand smoke increased the risk for obesity. The researchers examined mice who were exposed to secondhand smoke, and found that tobacco caused the body to develop insulin resistance, which is of course the first step toward type 2 diabetes, a chronic disorder often linked to obesity.

In 2016, journalist Adele Peters looked into the notorious air pollution of China’s capital city, Beijing. It seems to have been accepted that modern progress brings along a certain amount of asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease, if people insist on breathing the air.

But air as obesity villain is a relatively new concept. Scientists established a lab about a mile from a 14-lane highway, let some rats breathe the polluted air, and provided others with HEPA-filtered environments. The polluted-air rats became as much as 18% heavier.

Peters wrote in an article for Fast Company:

At the beginning of the experiment, pregnant rats in both groups were basically all the same weight. Nineteen days in, those unlucky enough to live with air pollution were 15% fatter, with inflammation in their lungs and signs of insulin resistance. When their babies were born, they also gained weight quickly; the female babies were 10% heavier than the ones living in the filtered cage, and the male babies were 18% fatter.

This doesn’t sound good at all. Additionally, people often forget that the environment includes everything that isn’t us, including the stuff we put in our mouths.

No, not food this time, although food certainly counts. This is about Triclosan.

The Food and Drug Administration took four decades to think it over, and finally banned the chemical from being an ingredient in soap. But it can still be in toothpaste, including the biggest-selling brands. It has been shown that chemicals are absorbed more efficiently through the tissues of the mouth than through the skin, but, apparently, the FDA did not get the memo.

Why is this a problem? Nikita Mishra writes in The Quint:

Even if a trillionth per gramme of this seeps into your body, it can affect your normal thyroid function; damage your brain lining; cause infertility; and is co-related to a host of chronic health issues, like childhood obesity and diabetes, among others.

Maybe this is all true; maybe it is needlessly alarmist. But is it worth taking the chance?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Toxic environment causing obesity, says professor,” Gulf-Times.com, 12/07/13
Source: “Children Exposed To Secondhand Smoke, Highway Air Pollution Are More Likely
To Gain Weight,” MedicalDaily.com, 11/12/14
Source: “The Smog in Your City is Why You’re Fat,” FastCompany.com, 03/08/16
Source: “Why Is a Banned Chemical Allowed in Leading Toothpastes?,” TheQuint.com, 09/14/16
Photo credit: Nick Harris1 via Visualhunt/CC BY-ND