Can’t Stick to Your Diet? Blame Your Gut Bacteria: Study

Microbes and bacteria in the digestive tract influence your eating habits, finds a study.

Some just fail to stick to their diets or switch to healthy eating. A team of experts from the University of California San Francisco, Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico found gut bacteria play a vital role in getting people to adjust to a particular eating and dietary regime. Their research found that different forms of bacteria trigger the desire to eat certain types of food and not adhere to a strict diet. The microbes thriving in the gut produce molecules that affect the vagus nerve connecting the brain and stomach.

"Microbes have the capacity to manipulate behavior and mood through altering the neural signals in the vagus nerve, changing taste receptors, producing toxins to make us feel bad, and releasing chemical rewards to make us feel good," said Athena Aktipis study author and senior researcher at the Arizona State University Department of Psychology, reports the Time.

In addition, the researchers confirmed that eating some type of food also interferes with our body's nutritional needs. A past clinical trial discovered that the intake of probiotics with lactobacillus casei improved functioning of bacteria living in food intestines.

These findings help regulate unhealthy behaviors like eating fattening food, high caloric snacks and sugary treats too often to prevent diseases and deadly health conditions.

"Because microbiota are easily manipulatable by prebiotics, probiotics, antibiotics, fecal transplants, and dietary changes, altering our microbiota offers a tractable approach to otherwise intractable problems of obesity and unhealthy eating," the authors write in the study, reports the Time.

More information is available online in the journal BioEssays.