How many times have you been told that you can control your weight simply by adjusting your diet and making time for exercise? The idea that we are able to completely control our weight through willpower and food intake has been seared into our thinking so frequently by friends, family, the media, and even or our doctors, that most people still blame MacDonalds for the country’s weight problems.

Yet, this week another study was published which strongly suggests that our weight is not, by any means, soley governed by what we eat. Rather, it is mediated by factors out of our control, one of them being the balance of chemicals in our bodies.

In a recent paper, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences Institute at the University of Tokyo in Japan explain two molecular pathways that directly affect the formation of adipocytes, another name for fat cells. At the center of both pathways is the nuclear receptor PPAR-gamma, a receptor that is also at the heart of the immune response.

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Several months ago, I reported on two studies published in the medical journal Nature by Jeff Gordon, a Washington University Scientist intent on investigating correlations between gut bacteria and weight.

Among Gordon’s findings was the fact that his obese and lean volunteers had substantially different compositions of bacteria in their guts. Obese volunteers had 20 percent more of a bacterial species called firmicutes in their gut, but harbored almost 90 percent less of another bacterial species called bacteroidetes than lean volunteers.

Interestingly, when obese subjects were put on a low-carb, low-fat diet, the composition of the bacteria in their guts started to adjust to more closely resemble the ratios of bacteria seen in their lean counterparts.

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Sarcoidosis succumbs to antibiotics. The title of Trevor Marshall PhD’s 2004 paper communicates that bacteria are playing a much larger role in driving illness than is commonly understood. An increasing number of doctors around the world are also implicating bacteria in chronic conditions. Among them is Dr. Jeff Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis whose recent paper about bacteria and obesity directly relates to Marshall’s work.

Obese individuals have different populations of microbes

Gordon’s two recent studies, which were published in a 2006 issue of Nature, describe a direct relationship between the relative abundance of certain bacteria in the gut and the tendency of an individual to gain weight.

All humans have trillions of bacteria living in the gut. Their role is to combat pathogens and break down food. In 2004, Gordon proposed that these microbes might play a role in controlling body weight.

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