Anyone looking to slim down ahead of summer’s imminent arrival by counting calories might also want to check the quality of those calories, according to new research.
The results of a clinical trial looking at how the gut microbe influences the production of energy by the body were published recently in Nature Communications.
The trial followed the energy intake, expenditure, and output of 17 healthy men and women as they were assigned two different diets for a total of 22 days each.
While both diets contained the same number of calories and comparable quantities of protein and carbohydrates, they were radically different in composition.
One was dubbed the “Western” diet and included typical U.S. processed foods such as deli meat, cheese puffs, white bread, cereal, and fruit juice.
The other was the “microbe enhancer diet, containing fiber-rich unprocessed foods such as nuts, steak, lentils, fruits, and vegetables.
As Karen D. Corbin of the AdventHealth Translational Research Institute of Metabolism and Diabetes in Orlando put it, the study conducted by her and her fellow researchers revealed that microbes in the gut compete with our bodies over calories, according to The Washington Post.
Yet gut microbes — the bacteria responsible for processing food, synthesizing essential nutrients, and more — can only make use of the calories that actually make their way down to where they reside in the large intestine.
This means that high-fiber foods, which aren’t absorbed by the body easily, feed the flora in the gut, whereas processed foods do not.
Calories from processed foods are absorbed quickly in the upper gastrointestinal tract and turned into energy for the body. This energy becomes stored as fat if it isn’t utilized.
“On a Western diet that doesn’t feed the microbes very much, almost all the energy goes to us and very little goes to the microbes,” Corbin explained, according to the WP.
After feeding the microbes, calories are expelled by the body as “biomass.”
In fact, a study of this biomass during the clinical trial found that participants’ bodies absorbed significantly fewer calories on the microbe enhancer diet than on the Western diet.
On average, they expelled 217 calories a day on the former and 101 calories on the latter.
As an added advantage for weight loss, participants exhibited high levels of satiety-promoting hormones on the microbe enhancer diet.
Popular weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic function much the same way, as The Dallas Express previously reported.
These injectable medications contain the active ingredient semaglutide, which mimics the satiety-promoting hormone GLP-1. This curbs hunger and thus results in weight loss.
Considering that obesity has become such a serious issue in the U.S. and Texas in particular, drugs such as these have proven useful for individuals who have not been able to achieve and maintain a healthy weight through dieting and calorie restriction.
Medical experts and groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics have recently been weighing weight loss drugs as treatment options for obese children, as The Dallas Express covered previously.
The rates of childhood obesity continue to grow, with Texas ranked 10th in the nation in 2021 due to roughly 21% of children between the ages of 10 and 17 qualifying as obese.