WARREN KING, L.Ac.

I have been pondering lately on why Americans are become so large so quickly. I think it is much more than we are eating more quantity of food and not exercising enough. It is true that we are what we eat, we take on the energy of the food we eat, it’s consciousness.  The chickens we eat mature in 42 days, half the time it took decades ago, cow’s are fattened on corn and given antibiotics to fatten them up. Now salmon has been genetically engineered to double in size and farmed fish are like couch potatoes, eating food not made for fish and with hardly room to move. Eggs are mostly made from chickens that are trapped in cages and can never move around. Milk has growth hormone to force the poor cows to produce an extra 10% more of milk. Even our vegetables and fruits have gotten larger with hybrids but more tasteless with less life force energy than they had in the past. Everything is big and fast, and we are getting fast big!  We need to get back to eating organic food mostly raised locally by loving and caring farmers.

How Intestinal Bacteria Can Cause Weight Changes

(and how sugar can change intestinal bacteria)

A high-fat, high-sugar diet does more than pump calories into your body. It also alters the composition of bacteria in your intestines, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, research in mice suggests. And the changeover can happen in as little as 24 hours, according to a report Wednesday in the new journal Science Translational Medicine.

Many factors play a role in the propensity to gain weight, including genetics, physical activity and the environment, as well as food choices. But a growing body of evidence, much of it accumulated by Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that bacteria in the gut also play a key role.

Humans need such bacteria to help convert otherwise indigestible foods into digestible form.

Ninety percent of the bacteria fall into two major divisions, or phyla: the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes. Previous research had shown that obese mice had higher levels of Firmicutes, and lean ones had more Bacteroidetes.

Analyzing the genomes of the bacteria, Gordon and graduate student Peter Turnbaugh concluded that the Firmicutes were more efficient at digesting food that the body can’t.

Animals that have a higher proportion of Firmicutes convert a higher proportion of food into calories that can be absorbed by the body, making it easier to gain weight.

When the researchers transferred bacteria from obese mice into so-called gnotobiotic mice, which were raised in a sterile environment and had no bacteria in their guts, the mice gained more weight than did those receiving a similar amount of bacteria from lean mice, even though they were fed the same diet.

Gordon and Turnbaugh found that they could transfer bacteria from human intestines into gnotobiotic mice, which were fed a low-fat, plant-rich diet in the weeks before the bacteria were transplanted and for a month afterward.

After the bacteria were transplanted from a lean human donor, the colonies in the mice had a high proportion of Bacteroidetes and a low proportion of Firmicutes. But within 24 hours after the mice were switched to a high-sugar, high-fat diet, the proportions of the two phyla were reversed.

With time, the mice also grew fatter than their littermates who did not receive the human bacteria.