A new study revealed that bacteria and brown fat can actually help you drop a couple of pounds effectively.
"We provide compelling evidence that gut microbes play a key role in our ability to adapt to the environment by directly regulating our energy balance," said University of Geneva's Professor Mirko Trajkovski, MailOnline noted. "We are excited about exploring the therapeutic potential of these findings and testing whether targeting some of these microbes could be a promising approach for preventing obesity and related metabolic conditions."
According to Reader's Digest, brown fat is a special type of fat that "can burn calories at a very high rate." It burns calories to produce heat; fully activated, it can produce 300 times more heat that any other tissues in the human body.
"Just two ounces of brown fat appear capable of burning several hundred calories per day-the equivalent of a 30-minute bout of exercise," the publication said, adding that most of our body fat is white and only small pockets of it are brown.
It's been established that animals and humans generate more of the brown fat when exposed to cold temperatures. However, in the study led by Professor Trajkovski, it was found that gut microbes apparently change, too, when the body is exposed to cold temperatures. At least in mice used in the research.
"For a month, the researchers put a group of mice in a special climate chamber that gradually grew colder and colder-similar to what happens in some mice's natural winter habitat," Time reported. "They kept a group of mice in room temperature to act as the control group and collected fecal samples from both throughout the month."
Unsurprisingly, the rodents lost weight as they got colder, but stopped after a couple of days when their bodies adapted to the temperature. However, the mice also "got better at harvesting calories from their food, because their intestines and villi that absorb nutrients in the gut became longer."
"The cold had created a supercharged gut, one that got more calories from the same amount of food," the news source added.
More than that, the composition of the gut bacteria changed, leading the scientists to suspect that this also played a part in the weight loss.
To confirm this, they transferred microbes from the mice tested to those that were bred without the gut bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila, in question. The result? They also showed the same changes as the mice who got the cold treatment.
"They developed more brown and beige fat, lost weight and had better insulin sensitivity (which helps them adapt to the cold)," Time said.
A previous study had shown that those with higher levels of the Akkermansia bacteria were more likely to lose fat. However, despite these exciting findings, more study needs to be done in order to validate the results, although there is much potential that this approach may be applied on human beings.
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