Especially during festive seasons when the family is together and everyone is feasting on some delicious food and irresistible baked goods, but somehow, some of us end up showing all the calories that we eat through our extra kilos, while some family members just get away miraculously without putting on any weight.
This holiday season, most of us have likely indulged in binge eating, so it is expected to put on a few extra kilos. But what is the reason that some people can gulp down more than others and still not gain any weight? The answer is in your gut, quiet literally.
According to recent research, experts found out that gut micro-organisms play a very important role in how your body absorbs energy from food. Those who consume more energy from their food are at higher risk of gaining weight than others.
The study, which was led by experts at the University of Copenhagen‘s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, was published in the journal Microbiome. As per the researchers, the study could be a step towards understanding why some people gain those extra kilos than others.
The team studied the residual energy in the faeces of 85 overweight Danish people aged 22 to 66 to understand how effective their gut microbes were at extracting energy from the food they consume.
During this time, the experts also mapped the composition of gut microbes for each participant.
For the study, the researchers analysed the gut microbiota – the trillion-strong community of microorganisms in the gut – from participants’ stool samples.
The researchers said that the gut microbiota is like “an entire galaxy in our gut” with a staggering 100 billion of them per gram of faeces.
The team found out that people who extracted the most energy from food weighed more on an average, in this case, which amounts to somewhere around extra nine kilograms.
Researchers realised that possible obesity in people could depend on how effectively the nutrients were extracted from food which may lead to more calories being available from the same amount of food.
“Bacteria’s metabolism of food provides extra energy in the form of, for example, short-chain fatty acids – molecules that our body can use as energy-supplying fuel,” said Professor Roager, adding that if we consume more energy than we burn, the extra energy provided by the intestinal bacteria could increase the risk of becoming overweight over time.
The study found that some people may have a different makeup of gut microorganisms than other people, which allows them to, on average, absorb more energy from meals. Whereas others are able to digest their food much faster and remain lean.
Though researchers used a small sample of participants for the study, it’s possible that the findings could very well be applied to global population.
