Your Weight Gain May Actually Be Linked To Consuming Excessive Antibiotics

The common belief is that, if you're overweight, it's because you have no self control or you're lazy. At least, that's what everyone else thinks of those overweight.

But a lot of things can affect weight gain, including the kind of medication you're taking.

Reuters

But if things were that simple then diet and exercise would be the clear cut solution for everyone right? And though that does work for some people who are merely out of shape, it's not a universal fix. In fact, something as simple as having a weaker immune system could mean you put on more weight.

To understand this, we need to go back to just after the end of World War II. Around that time, antibiotics became more affordable and therefore more accessible for the first time. So farmers began giving it to livestock when they needed treatment. What they saw was that the animals that got regular antibiotics also grew larger and more quickly.

After that a number of companies began patenting livestock feed loaded with antibiotics. Many of these used simple penicillin. After all, if it keeps your cows healthy and make them fat at the same time it's a win-win right?

For years we didn't exactly understand why this happened, though we exploited it. Only recently, researchers have shown that antibiotics kill off some of the bacteria in the livestock's gut, responsible for digesting food. Specifically, these microbes break down nutrients in the food and help them pass through the walls of the bowel, so they're absorbed into the blood stream. They're the difference between food consumption and nutrition.

Pixabay

And what works for cows in this case also works for people. When you take a lot of antibiotics, you're killing off more and more of certain types of bacteria in your gut. And over time, this makes you obese.

The science behind it

And obesity has been on the rise since the 20th century, around the same time antibiotics first became commonplace. That's not necessarily a direct correlation, but there is cause for investigation. And that's what Jeffrey Gordon did back in 2006.

As a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Gordon studied obesity in mice and learned something important. He found that obese mice had fewer of the Bacteroides species of microbes in their guts (which are killed off by antibiotics) and more of Firmicutes compared to thinner ones. What this essentially translated to was that this composition of microbe diversity was better at energy harvest. They were better at absorbing calories from food and passing it onto the body.

To put it simply, taking more antibiotics kills off the gut bacteria responsible for countering calorie absorption. So though you may be eating the same amount of food as a thinner person, your body is absorbing more calories, and you're getting fatter, faster.

Libreshot

It's since also been proven that similar bacteria population patterns are directly linked with obesity in humans. Since then, preliminary research has also shown that adding a single species of bacteria to a person's stomach can alter their metabolism. It's by no means a definitive treatment for obesity, but there is promise for further study there.

Eventually, scientists believe we might actually be able to "cure" obesity simply by modifying the microbial biome in a person's body.