Does my butt look fat with these bacteria?

[Left]

...I'm geeking out on this ATM.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/gut-microbiome-bacteria-weight-loss?page=1

A few years before Super Size Me hit theaters in 2004, Dr. Paresh Dandona, a diabetes specialist in Buffalo, New York, set out to measure the body's response to McDonald's—specifically breakfast. Over several mornings, he fed nine normal-weight volunteers an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties.

Dandona is a professor at the State University of New York-Buffalo who also heads the Diabetes-Endocrinology Center of Western New York, and what he observed has informed his research ever since. Levels of a C-reactive protein, an indicator of systemic inflammation, shot up "within literally minutes."

...So I'm going to try to switch my diet.  My diet was already *pretty* good, but I've been stressing a lot, and was allowing cookies to occur.

I didn't think a *little* high-sugar food was *that* bad...but apparently, it is, and in a sneaky, long-term way, not a "get-instantly-yucky-feeling" way. 

Eat beans daily, which I'd gotten away from, stick to brown rice, barley, and sweet potatoes (thanks, Alty!) for my carbohydrates , and take probiotics.

...I want to see if the 30 pounds I put on will go away again this way.  I also want to see if, over time, my allergies and asthma will get back to the way they used to be-a lot better than the trainwreck they are now.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

There's a bit of a flaw in this research, which is that "an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties" is about 1200 calories, or roughly 3-4 times the caloric content of a normal healthy breakfast.

[Left]

There's a bit of a flaw in this research, which is that "an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties" is about 1200 calories, or roughly 3-4 times the caloric content of a normal healthy breakfast.

True that...
I wonder how many people eat just that for breakfast, tho?
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-02-04/mcdonalds-24-7

The $21.6 billion company now feeds a record 27 million people every day, 1 million more every year since 2003.

300 million of us, so 11% of our entire population eats there on any given day.  Wow...

[East Coast Hustle]

I think you meant 9%, but without any data on WHAT they eat there it's not really relevant.

[Left]

I think you meant 9%, but without any data on WHAT they eat there it's not really relevant.

For the former, I'll totally take your word for it, tho 300/27=11.111...
...For about the millionth time, I hate having dyscalculia...
...Thanks for reminding me...*Goes and finds algebra to beat head against*

Not relevant, no.
Just surprising that it's *that many* people to me, is all. 
It's expensive there. 

I'm not finding anything that averages out how many calories the typical customer eats at McDonalds on a given visit.
There's this bit talking about the benefit of having calorie counts posted....
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443884104577647400959492314

...But the initial article was more about how what we eat changes our intestinal flora, and how the changes in the intestinal flora might be responsible for much of the inflammation a crappy diet causes...and thus much of the disease associated with obesity.

Inflammation might not be a symptom, it could be a cause. According to this theory, it is the immune activation caused by lousy food that prompts insulin and leptin resistance. Sugar builds up in your blood. Insulin increases. Your liver and pancreas strain to keep up. All because the loudly blaring danger signal—the inflammation—hampers your cells' ability to respond to hormonal signals.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think you meant 9%, but without any data on WHAT they eat there it's not really relevant.

For the former, I'll totally take your word for it, tho 300/27=11.111...
...For about the millionth time, I hate having dyscalculia...
...Thanks for reminding me...*Goes and finds algebra to beat head against*

Not relevant, no.
Just surprising that it's *that many* people to me, is all. 
It's expensive there. 

I'm not finding anything that averages out how many calories the typical customer eats at McDonalds on a given visit.
There's this bit talking about the benefit of having calorie counts posted....
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443884104577647400959492314

...But the initial article was more about how what we eat changes our intestinal flora, and how the changes in the intestinal flora might be responsible for much of the inflammation a crappy diet causes...and thus much of the disease associated with obesity.

Inflammation might not be a symptom, it could be a cause. According to this theory, it is the immune activation caused by lousy food that prompts insulin and leptin resistance. Sugar builds up in your blood. Insulin increases. Your liver and pancreas strain to keep up. All because the loudly blaring danger signal—the inflammation—hampers your cells' ability to respond to hormonal signals.

But their methodology is for shit, making it hard to draw any legitimate conclusions from the study.

[Left]

Hmm.
See, I'd heard it was the other way 'round.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130305145145.htm

Mar. 5, 2013 — The inflammation of fat tissue is part of a spiraling series of events that leads to the development of type 2 diabetes in some obese people. But researchers have not understood what triggers the inflammation, or why.
In Cell Metabolism this month (cover), scientists from The Methodist Hospital report fat cells themselves are at least partly to blame -- high calorie diets cause the cells to make major histocompatibility complex II, a group of proteins usually expressed to help the immune system fight off viruses and bacteria.In overweight mice and humans the fat cells, or adipocytes, are issuing false distress signals -- they are not under attack by pathogens. But this still sends local immune cells into a tizzy, and that causes inflammation.

So the fat would come first, then the inflammation.
However...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/health/studies-focus-on-gut-bacteria-in-weight-loss.html?_r=0

Here the researchers first did gastric bypasses on mice, then took fecal bacteria from said mice and installed said bacteria in mice that had not received a bypass. The latter dropped weight.

Also mentioned in the Times article:

A second study by a different group found that overweight people may be more likely to harbor a certain type of intestinal microbe...

The study involved 792 people who had their breath analyzed to help diagnose digestive orders. They agreed to let researchers measure the levels of hydrogen and methane; elevated levels indicate the presence of a microbe called Methanobrevibacter smithii. The people with the highest readings on the breath test were more likely to be heavier and have more body fat, and the researchers suspect that the microbes may be at least partly responsible for their obesity.

Edit:  Though correlation ain't causation-so no telling here whether the fat or the bacteria came first, yeah...

http://www.livescience.com/39445-gut-bacteria-transplant-weight.html
Another mouse study:

mice that had been raised in a sterile environment, so that they lacked gut bacteria, were transplanted with gut bacteria from either a lean person or an obese person. The researchers used gut bacteria from pairs of human twins, one of whom was lean and one who was obese.

Mice that received bacteria from an obese twin gained more weight and fat than those that received bacteria from a lean twin

...And in the second part of the same study:

... the researchers put the mice together – they housed mice that received gut bacteria from a lean person along with mice that received bacteria from an obese person.

About 10 days later, mice with the "obese" bacteria underwent changes in metabolism that protect against obesity.

BUUUT...

when the researchers repeated their housing experiment, but fed the mice a Westernized diet (high in fat and low in fiber) instead of their usual diet, the obesity protection was no longer transferred.

*Shrug*

Thanks for making me work my brain, BTW.  It seems to be intent on turning into a pile of depressed goo these days.