A bacteria that can create calories out of thin air sounds like it’d be useful, if true.
The belief in bacteria causing obesity is so prevalent in the medical world, that you can’t donate fecal matter for a fecal transplant if you’re above a certain body fat percentage, because it’s believed bacteria obese people carry that caused them to become obese will make a thin person obese if the bacteria is transplanted to the thin person from the obese person.
Because the actual theory is that certain bacteria in the gut biome make a person more prone to obesity both by increasing hunger signals to the brain and by changing digestive processes. It doesn’t “make calories out of thin air”.
Maybe read more of the articles than just the headlines?
Lucky you having been born in the prosperous West. Too bad you didn’t make the most of your free public education.
Maybe they’re American and paid for a poor one?
Let me re-frame the question in terms you’ll find easier to understand:
The belief that fires need oxygen to burn is so prevalent in the forestry world; how come you don’t see massive forest fires in the desert where they’ve got the same amount of oxygen? A prevalent gas that can trigger combustion on demand sounds like it’d be useful, if true.
The bacteria don’t produce calories out of thin air, even high school physics will teach you that energy needs to be conserved!
I didn’t do biology, but from my understanding, energy (mostly) comes from the food you eat, and any excess is stored as fat. Obesity occurs when you have too much of that excess where it is a health risk, and differs depending on your metabolism and that sort (which things like gut bacteria can change because of weird biology shenanigans, don’t ask me, I’m a physicist).
But if there is no food, then you don’t intake any energy. Famine is defined as the widespread lack of food (by natural or artificial causes, unfortunately it’s often the latter), and when you don’t have food, you don’t tend to have high obesity rates.
A healthy gut microbiome may help regulate the calories extracted from food, but no bacteria will create calories out of nothing.
im someone who seems to not put on weight super easy and my wife is the opposite. 100% she seems to digest food more thoroughly than I. A lot of veg, especially like corn but I have had tomatoe, shows up in my stool. never in hers.
