Gut Bacteria Could Determine Effectiveness of Diets

The importance of intestinal flora has recently become very clear. This helps to explain why yogurts, other prebiotic and probiotic foods have become a common part of the mainstream grocery shelves. We know that gut bacteria is important to digestion and overall health. It was also recently discovered that healthy bacteria living in your digestive system can also help to determine the effectiveness of diets for your unique body.
The connection between gut bacteria and dieting results could potentially help to explain why the effectiveness of diets will differ among you, your friends and your family members.
In fact, scientists have recently used the information they’ve found about digestive bacteria in order to help to identify the effectiveness of diets for individuals who are seeking to reduce their weight and/or lower their risk of certain diseases, strictly by examining the makeup of their intestinal flora.
This represents the first time scientists have been able to use a person’s digestive bacteria levels in order to gauge the ways in which those life forms will impact their host human’s metabolism. It could also open up the door for doctors to be able to create a personalized dieting strategy for patients based on the results of some very basic medical tests. Moreover, it could also help them to improve their weight loss results by providing supplementation or removal of certain strains of bacteria from the digestive system.
That is all well and good but you may still be wondering how something like digestive bacteria can determine which dieting strategy will be best for you. It all has to do with the way that flora helps your body to digest the foods you eat. While most of us tend to think about calories and nutrients as something contained by foods, a great deal of nutrition actually has to do with the bacteria that cause those foods to break down and not necessarily what those foods contain.
Each of us have our own unique combination of bacteria in our bodies. This means that we all also break down food in our own unique way. This helps to explain why some people are able to eat fast food every day without gaining weight, while others stick to a strict nutritious routine and still watch the pounds climb on every week.
A growing body of medical research is indicating that our gut bacteria is what decides how foods will be used by the body. By understanding a person’s unique bacteria composition, it becomes easier to predict the way foods will be used when they are consumed. Therefore, an appropriate weight loss strategy can be designed based on those outcomes.