Don't eat for 2, your pregnancy microbes do it for you!

When I started this blog last year, common belief was that as long as babies are in the womb, they are free of germs (early post on MBAI), but this is now shifting to the understanding that babies are being colonized prior to their birth. But how are they? And what does mum do about it?

 In that earlier MBAI post, I also wrote that a mum's microbiota changes during pregnancy to prepare for baby's birth and colonization. Today, I'm exploring this in more detail:

A 2012 study showed that the microbiota of a 1st trimester pregnant woman was different than the microbiota of a 3rd trimester pregnant woman and it had a profound impact on the woman's metabolism.

By transferring their respective human poo into germ-free bubble mice, they observed that the mice acquiring the poop from heavily-pregnant women became obese, insulin-resistant, and had a greater inflammatory response than lean mice that received poop from newly-pregnant women.
Extraordinary!
But why?
Those changes that include enhanced absorption of sugar and fat from food, and stimulation of the immune system are all in place to ensure a healthy fetal development.

Extracting more calories from food is a feature of bacterial strains that may live predominantly in overweight and obese people - read MBAI 'Is calorie counting over?'

The study also showed that this special pregnancy microbiota was not back to normal straight after birth as they tested it one month postpartum, which is interesting and makes me wonder if there are studies that show if it ever comes back to normal...(and that would explain a lot to a lot of mums...)

Did you put a lot of weight on during pregnancy?

See you next Monday,

Is calorie counting over? Part II

Our microbiota is responsible for the extraction of calories and therefore energy from the food we ingest (more about this here).

This calorie intake will depend on how our small intestine is working but also on the type of microbes that have settled in our large intestine which will help digest the indigestible bits of food.

The diversity in micro-organism species we are harbouring will depend on the diet that our body is used to. For someone who is not used to eating a cookie, his bugs will extract less calories than bugs hosted by a person who loves his one cookie-a-day' (Read Part I).

It’s not how much but how well you eat that will determine your in/out calorie traffic – Would you like to tweet this?

But what happens next to these extra calories depends on a different set of processes with different objectives:



Indeed, what we eat can be either used immediately (brain food, muscle energy, or in time of cold weather to keep us warm) or stored for later use, you know… in case of famine and shortage of food…

What determines the faith of our calorie trafficking will depend on various factors including gene switching.

When we talk about genes, we automatically think about something we inherit from our parents. But the reality is that, it is also not the complete story as genes can be turned on and turned off, notably by our own body-controlled signals. What is now known, however, is that our gut microbiota can also contribute to this gene modulation.

Our gut microbiota influences genes responsible for the conversion of energy into fat – Would you like to tweet this?

Unfortunately for the cookie lover, the genes responsible for the transformation of energy into fats are hyper-activated i.e. the cookie lover doesn’t only extract more calories out of his cookie, but his body also tells him to store it as fat.

That is because in obesity the rules and regulations of energy storage are fundamentally changed.

Although microbiota has an influence, which I will hopefully fully explore later, there are many more on and off switchings that contribute to this whole disease – many known, but many more so unknown…

That is why sudden exercise and a healthy diet are just not enough to control a healthy weight!

Did you know the bugs inside your gut control your calorie intake? Do you like your one-a-day cookie?

I certainly do

If you’d like to share your thoughts, feel free to leave me a comment, I’d love to read them.