Weight Loss Surgery Works – Not Why You Think – This is What Happens When #weightloss #health #diet

Overweight and ready to take action?

Every year nearly 200,000 Americans opt for a more extreme, old-fashioned solution: surgery. Physically altering the size and shape of the stomach. wired.com

But it may be that drastically chopping up your gut makes the lasting change by rearranging your internal bacteria.

You, and every human being, are a zoo of microbes – on your skin and inside your body. I’ve seen estimates that four pounds of your body weight isn’t you at all – it’s your resident flora and fauna. One of the things they do is secret hormones that supplement what your human organs provide.

You can’t yet buy a supplement that would place weight-loss bacteria into your unaltered gut, and most of those “as seen on TV” products are hooey. But “the end goal is to come up with a probiotic that can be used to enhance weight loss instead of surgery,” and it may be possible.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Or, at least, interesting? Like Alice’s mushroom, if one side makes you smaller will you need another to make you bigger?

 

Life Is… #surprisingthing in #science #poetry

Newcomers hog the spotlight

Age of Fishes, Paleozoic,
Age of Reptiles, Mesozoic,
Age of Mammals, Cenozoic,
Age of Man, Anthropocene,
These all miss the major theme.
Outstanding feature of life’s scene
Is a constant domination,
Now, as ever since creation,
Reigning through life’s whole duration.

Count by biomass or cells,
Eon, epoch, era tells
In what period life dwells.

It’s the Age of Microbes!
It’s been the Age of Microbes.
Will always be,
On land and sea,
Earth in the Age of Microbes.

Poem by Kate Rauner

We humans are impressed by big, fierce creatures – but nature is not. “What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria.” Stephen Jay Gould

Long, Long, Long Lost Brothers

Thirty years ago, Danish scientists collected small, floating marine creatures off an Australian coast. Among those specimens, they have now announced, are “two new species of what they call Dendrogramma in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE.” These new species are so strange they may have last shared a common ancestor with humans 600 million years ago. They may represent a new phylum.

Long before modern science, philosophers separated life into the Kingdoms of Animal and Plant. In Today’s taxonomy, Kingdoms are divided into Phyla; for example, Chordata, the phylum that unites you and me with sea squirts. A phylum is a very basic classification. A new phylum is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary scrutiny.

The Dendrogrammas are weird little guys, but aren’t likely to star in their own SyFy monster movie. They look like odd jellyfish. The Kingdoms of Animals and Plants got all the big, flashy species, at least from a human point of view. Once microscopes allowed a more detailed examination, three or four groups of microbes (the science is still developing) were so different they were classified in their own Kingdoms, and they won’t get their own monster movie, either. But we still live on the Planet of Bacteria. We, who have dominion over the beasts of the field, should contemplate our small brethren who out-number us, out-weigh us, and may out-survive us.