The feeling of satiety is generated from both the brain and the rest of the body, mainly the gut. A lot can go wrong here. In obese people the gene that codes for satiety may be defective and thus lead to over eating.

Pending further studies on the effectiveness of each strain of these bacteria on each other and on us and to understand how they affect our health and behaviour and how we might modify them to help us more, there are a few things we can now do to cultivate healthy and fat-reducing gut flora.

1. Get off Artificial Sweeteners and most other fake sugars (See – ‘Artificial & Natural Sweeteners’)

Studies have shown that these adversely affect the good bacteria in our gut and hence are nearly as bad as the sugar they are the substitute for. Natural sweeteners extracted from plants and berries such Stevia, Mogrosides from the Monk fruit, Yacon syrup and Trehalose are some of the sweeteners that may be used.

2. Go fermented:

Fermented foods contain high levels of healthy bacteria and should be viewed as mandatory. Foods such as Paneer or Cottage Cheese, Kimchee, Sauerkraut, unsweetened plain yogurt. For the first month of your diet stick with Kimchee and Sauerkraut as even unsweetened plain yoghurt contains calories. Consume 5 forkfuls of either every morning before breakfast and add Kimchee to almost all meals. Fermented foods also help maintain Vitamin K-2 levels.

3. Be careful about using antibiotics: – (See – ‘Glossary and Explanation of Terms’).
4. Consider Prebiotics and Probiotics – (See – ‘Glossary and Explanation of Terms’).

Such pre- and probiotics also have beneficial effects on allergies, obesity and a range of diseases from AIDS to type 2 Diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety symptoms and depression.

Again as Giulia Enders writes, Mother Nature in the small intestine makes use of the fact that all living things are made out of the same basic ingredients, sugar molecules, amino acids and fats. Everything we eat comes from living things – at this biological level there is no difference between an apple tree and a sheep.

Today we get about 90 percent of our nutrition from what we eat and about 10 percent from what our bacteria make and feed us. This 10 percent makes a big difference and we therefore need to think about more than just the calories we consume.

Bacteria are able to make various fatty acids out of indigestible carbohydrates: vegetables loving bacteria tend to manufacture fatty acids for the gut and the liver, others produce fatty acids that feed the rest of the body. Thus a banana is less likely to make us fat than half a chocolate bar containing the same number of calories. The bacteria population of our mouth, especially at the back of the tongue, is only about one ten thousand^th that of our gut, yet they act on what we eat and drink to give us the after taste we experience and appreciate, of each of them.

But gut bacteria alone cannot cause so much weight gain. Inflammation is the marker and it seems to arise from ‘sub-clinical’ infections. Bacteria have a signaling substance on their surface that tells the body to react as infected. As long as the bacteria remain in their mucous membrane home in the gut, this signaling substance remains unnoticed. But when bacteria appear in disadvantageous combinations, or when their host eats an overly wrong diet, too many of them can find their way into the bloodstream and signal low-key infection, calling on the body to build up fat reserves for leaner times.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7