so we all know why people get fat don’t
we it’s because they eat too much and
they move too little it’s because they
eat the wrong foods it’s because they
are greedy and they are lazy and we all
know what they need to do to be mean
they need to eat less they need to move
more they need to cut down on fat and
sugar processed foods may be cut down on
eating on certain days of the week or is
it gluten in on a second whatever it is
whatever nutrient we cut down on we just
know that they need more willpower
that’s the message that we’ve been
getting for years but we also know that
diets don’t work
multiple studies show that it’s
extremely difficult to lose weight and
even the people who do manage it
usually regain that weight and more
within a couple of years so what if
we’re looking at this the wrong way
around I’m going to show you a couple of
maps so this is the spread of obesity
across America over the past 30 or so
years so in the top left you can see a
map that has a lot of white space that’s
just where they haven’t recorded how
many people are obese because it doesn’t
seem to matter very much at this point
in time the blue bits though where
people are around 10% obese and you can
see as time goes on that people form
apps get bluer and then yellow and then
red and that’s showing that people are
getting fatter
so by 2010 nearly 10 years ago now we’re
not doing towards the sort of 30% obese
point that’s a big change in not very
long and this is only obese people this
isn’t including people who are simply
overweight actually something like 7 in
10 people in America overweight or obese
so and it has a kind of resembles
slightly the spread of an infectious
disease slightly worryingly
so across America so I want to consider
an alternative to this
we’ve been dieting and exercising for
nearly 70 years we’ve been eating
cleanly we’ve been doing everything that
the media tells us to do that our
governments tell us to do in order to
lose weight and be lean and we just keep
getting fatter
what if we’re thinking about it the
wrong way around
what if weight gain isn’t a symptom of
energy excess but a disease of energy
regulation what if there’s something in
our bodies which is making us gain
weight and as a response we need to eat
more to satisfy it I want to give you a
new view on obesity there isn’t
dependent on us being less sinful less
greedy less lazy doesn’t involve
willpower I want to give you a view
where you see obesity as some kind of
biological change I think there are
multiple reasons for this change and I’m
going to share one of them with you
today which is the role of our gut
microbes in controlling our weights so
we’ve all heard a lot about gut microbes
in the last few years we know that
they’re about 100 trillion of them
living in US and on us and most of them
live in our guts and they are
responsible for keeping us healthy they
protect us from allergies they stop us
getting autoimmune diseases they even
control our mental health and our
behavior and importantly they seem to be
involved in regulating our weights so I
want to show you this picture of some
mice those two mice in the middle though
and the middle band they are sisters
they’re genetically I don’t
identical and they have the same access
to food and to exercise as one another
they’re also germ-free so that means
that they were born in a sterile bubble
they have no gut microbes in them
whatsoever
which means that we can colonize them
how we want to so in this experiment the
scientist took a group of women who were
twins and in each twin pair one was
obese and the other was mean and they
transferred the microbes of these women
into germ-free mice the mice that which
received microbes from the lean women
remained lean and the mice which
received microbes from the obese women
became obese and they did not eat more
food this tells us something extremely
important about how obesity works
it’s the microbes that made their bodies
store more fat the mice didn’t suddenly
become greedy and lazy they didn’t start
eating chocolate and chips
they just got new microbes and that made
them fat we can actually see the same
kind of effect in pregnant women so as
women approached the end of their
pregnancies they need to lay down fat in
order to nourish their babies and to
prepare for breast feeding so in
pregnant women if we look at their gut
microbes they are actually as they get
through their pregnancy becoming more
and more like the gut microbes of obese
people and that enables them to not
actually need to eat for two their
microbes are doing it for them they’re
transforming the way their body works in
in order to enable them to store more
fats for their baby so how do they do
this well firstly and most simply they
simply extract more food more energy
from the food that we eat so if you take
a germ-free mice and you just stick some
microbes in there it immediately becomes
fatter and it also stops eating so much
food eats less gets fatter so when you
look at a nutrition label and it tells
you that something’s got 100 calories in
it take that with a pinch of salt
because it’s your body and your microbes
that determine how many calories are in
that food the second thing that they do
is they affect our appetites
so when you eat some plant-based food
that’s high in fiber you are feeding
your microbes
and they then turn that that food into
chemicals which satisfy your appetite so
you feel full because you have fed them
the third thing they do which I think is
the most important is they affect the
amount of energy that your body chooses
to store as fat so if you have an
unhealthy microbiome that allows
chemicals from your gut to get into your
bloodstream it annoys your immune system
it starts to react and that actually
changes the way that genes in your fat
cells work and it tells those fat cells
to store more energy as fat so this is
obviously pretty important stuff and
it’s important to figure out what it is
that we’re doing to our microbes to
damage them in the first place so that
they can do these things to us in the
West we know that people have much less
diverse microbiomes than people do in
more rural pre-industrial parts of the
world and we even know that people in
the West who have less diverse
microbiomes are less healthy and more
likely to be overweight so obviously
something is damaging the diversity the
number of different kinds of bacteria
that are living in our guts
the most obvious thing I’m going to tell
you about – the most obvious thing is
antibiotics so in America they eat 452
million fewer chickens each year than
they would have to if it weren’t for
antibiotics in the 1940s soon after
antibiotics were mass-produced
farmers quickly realized that if they
gave antibiotics to their farm animals
they got fat and so now in much of the
world farm farm animals that are being
raised for their meat are given
antibiotics on a daily basis to make
them gain weight in the 1950s some
doctors who are looking after premature
babies thought maybe this could help us
and these little babies who were
struggling to gain weight so they
started giving antibiotics to the babies
and sure enough they got fat and in the
army doctors were wondering whether they
could help their soldiers to resist
disease by giving
an extra dose of antibiotics every day
to make sure that they didn’t succumb to
infections and being the army they
recorded everything so they discovered
that actually not only did it not help
them to resist disease but also it made
these soldiers fatter when they were
taking antibiotics you might think that
we would take these things as a warning
the antibiotics are changing the way our
bodies work and affecting our weights
but apparently not in fact we know that
it’s true in mice as well if you give
them penicillin they get fatter and we
know that it’s not the drugs themselves
because if you then take those gut
microbes from the fat mice that have had
the penicillin and put them into it
germ-free mouse mouse that Mouse gets
fat too even though it’s never touched
the antibiotics and we know that it
happens in humans too women who take
antibiotics in pregnancy are almost
there children are almost twice as
likely to be obese as women who didn’t
take any antibiotics in pregnancy the
other thing that I want to talk to you
about I should say first of all that
antibiotics antibiotics are absolutely
life-saving drugs and they are essential
for us but we already know that they’re
causing antibiotic antibiotic resistance
and that’s a massive problem and we need
to take onboard that they can also have
an impact on our health so the other
thing that’s interrupting our
microbiomes and stopping them from being
as healthy as they could be is food our
diets so I know I’ve been trying to
persuade you that diets don’t matter but
here’s my caveat what you feed your
microbes does matter our food most of it
is absorbed in our small intestines
that’s where it gets broken down by our
own enzymes gets into our bloodstream
and nourishes us but fiber which comes
from plant foods passes straight through
it can’t be broken down by us and so it
goes on to our large intestines and
there it feeds our microbes and as a
result of that they can then give us the
benefit
of the chemicals that they produce from
that food so those chemicals calm our
immune systems they tell us that we feel
full they even send messages to our
brains to make us feel happy and they
control how much fat our fat cells store
crucially so we know that in our
ancestors ate around 100 to 200 grams of
fiber – per day but we in the West
struggle to eat 20 grams of fiber per
day so our microbes are really missing
out on their food source and we know it
matters to you when you add fiber to the
diets of mice who are being fed at an
extremely high fat diet they resist
obesity and humans who have a lower
fiber intake are more likely to be
overweight so what I want you to take
away is that we are looking at obesity
the wrong way around
we’ve been dieting we’ve been exercising
we’ve been blaming ourselves for our
sinful greedy lazy nature’s and none of
it’s working so maybe we should be
looking at it the other way around and
thinking about our microbes and other
things that are affecting our biology
and changing the way we store fat and
perhaps that then goes on to make us
want to eat more because we’re not
getting the benefit of that energy one
thing’s for sure if you look after your
microbes you’re looking after yourself
thank you [Applause]
we it’s because they eat too much and
they move too little it’s because they
eat the wrong foods it’s because they
are greedy and they are lazy and we all
know what they need to do to be mean
they need to eat less they need to move
more they need to cut down on fat and
sugar processed foods may be cut down on
eating on certain days of the week or is
it gluten in on a second whatever it is
whatever nutrient we cut down on we just
know that they need more willpower
that’s the message that we’ve been
getting for years but we also know that
diets don’t work
multiple studies show that it’s
extremely difficult to lose weight and
even the people who do manage it
usually regain that weight and more
within a couple of years so what if
we’re looking at this the wrong way
around I’m going to show you a couple of
maps so this is the spread of obesity
across America over the past 30 or so
years so in the top left you can see a
map that has a lot of white space that’s
just where they haven’t recorded how
many people are obese because it doesn’t
seem to matter very much at this point
in time the blue bits though where
people are around 10% obese and you can
see as time goes on that people form
apps get bluer and then yellow and then
red and that’s showing that people are
getting fatter
so by 2010 nearly 10 years ago now we’re
not doing towards the sort of 30% obese
point that’s a big change in not very
long and this is only obese people this
isn’t including people who are simply
overweight actually something like 7 in
10 people in America overweight or obese
so and it has a kind of resembles
slightly the spread of an infectious
disease slightly worryingly
so across America so I want to consider
an alternative to this
we’ve been dieting and exercising for
nearly 70 years we’ve been eating
cleanly we’ve been doing everything that
the media tells us to do that our
governments tell us to do in order to
lose weight and be lean and we just keep
getting fatter
what if we’re thinking about it the
wrong way around
what if weight gain isn’t a symptom of
energy excess but a disease of energy
regulation what if there’s something in
our bodies which is making us gain
weight and as a response we need to eat
more to satisfy it I want to give you a
new view on obesity there isn’t
dependent on us being less sinful less
greedy less lazy doesn’t involve
willpower I want to give you a view
where you see obesity as some kind of
biological change I think there are
multiple reasons for this change and I’m
going to share one of them with you
today which is the role of our gut
microbes in controlling our weights so
we’ve all heard a lot about gut microbes
in the last few years we know that
they’re about 100 trillion of them
living in US and on us and most of them
live in our guts and they are
responsible for keeping us healthy they
protect us from allergies they stop us
getting autoimmune diseases they even
control our mental health and our
behavior and importantly they seem to be
involved in regulating our weights so I
want to show you this picture of some
mice those two mice in the middle though
and the middle band they are sisters
they’re genetically I don’t
identical and they have the same access
to food and to exercise as one another
they’re also germ-free so that means
that they were born in a sterile bubble
they have no gut microbes in them
whatsoever
which means that we can colonize them
how we want to so in this experiment the
scientist took a group of women who were
twins and in each twin pair one was
obese and the other was mean and they
transferred the microbes of these women
into germ-free mice the mice that which
received microbes from the lean women
remained lean and the mice which
received microbes from the obese women
became obese and they did not eat more
food this tells us something extremely
important about how obesity works
it’s the microbes that made their bodies
store more fat the mice didn’t suddenly
become greedy and lazy they didn’t start
eating chocolate and chips
they just got new microbes and that made
them fat we can actually see the same
kind of effect in pregnant women so as
women approached the end of their
pregnancies they need to lay down fat in
order to nourish their babies and to
prepare for breast feeding so in
pregnant women if we look at their gut
microbes they are actually as they get
through their pregnancy becoming more
and more like the gut microbes of obese
people and that enables them to not
actually need to eat for two their
microbes are doing it for them they’re
transforming the way their body works in
in order to enable them to store more
fats for their baby so how do they do
this well firstly and most simply they
simply extract more food more energy
from the food that we eat so if you take
a germ-free mice and you just stick some
microbes in there it immediately becomes
fatter and it also stops eating so much
food eats less gets fatter so when you
look at a nutrition label and it tells
you that something’s got 100 calories in
it take that with a pinch of salt
because it’s your body and your microbes
that determine how many calories are in
that food the second thing that they do
is they affect our appetites
so when you eat some plant-based food
that’s high in fiber you are feeding
your microbes
and they then turn that that food into
chemicals which satisfy your appetite so
you feel full because you have fed them
the third thing they do which I think is
the most important is they affect the
amount of energy that your body chooses
to store as fat so if you have an
unhealthy microbiome that allows
chemicals from your gut to get into your
bloodstream it annoys your immune system
it starts to react and that actually
changes the way that genes in your fat
cells work and it tells those fat cells
to store more energy as fat so this is
obviously pretty important stuff and
it’s important to figure out what it is
that we’re doing to our microbes to
damage them in the first place so that
they can do these things to us in the
West we know that people have much less
diverse microbiomes than people do in
more rural pre-industrial parts of the
world and we even know that people in
the West who have less diverse
microbiomes are less healthy and more
likely to be overweight so obviously
something is damaging the diversity the
number of different kinds of bacteria
that are living in our guts
the most obvious thing I’m going to tell
you about – the most obvious thing is
antibiotics so in America they eat 452
million fewer chickens each year than
they would have to if it weren’t for
antibiotics in the 1940s soon after
antibiotics were mass-produced
farmers quickly realized that if they
gave antibiotics to their farm animals
they got fat and so now in much of the
world farm farm animals that are being
raised for their meat are given
antibiotics on a daily basis to make
them gain weight in the 1950s some
doctors who are looking after premature
babies thought maybe this could help us
and these little babies who were
struggling to gain weight so they
started giving antibiotics to the babies
and sure enough they got fat and in the
army doctors were wondering whether they
could help their soldiers to resist
disease by giving
an extra dose of antibiotics every day
to make sure that they didn’t succumb to
infections and being the army they
recorded everything so they discovered
that actually not only did it not help
them to resist disease but also it made
these soldiers fatter when they were
taking antibiotics you might think that
we would take these things as a warning
the antibiotics are changing the way our
bodies work and affecting our weights
but apparently not in fact we know that
it’s true in mice as well if you give
them penicillin they get fatter and we
know that it’s not the drugs themselves
because if you then take those gut
microbes from the fat mice that have had
the penicillin and put them into it
germ-free mouse mouse that Mouse gets
fat too even though it’s never touched
the antibiotics and we know that it
happens in humans too women who take
antibiotics in pregnancy are almost
there children are almost twice as
likely to be obese as women who didn’t
take any antibiotics in pregnancy the
other thing that I want to talk to you
about I should say first of all that
antibiotics antibiotics are absolutely
life-saving drugs and they are essential
for us but we already know that they’re
causing antibiotic antibiotic resistance
and that’s a massive problem and we need
to take onboard that they can also have
an impact on our health so the other
thing that’s interrupting our
microbiomes and stopping them from being
as healthy as they could be is food our
diets so I know I’ve been trying to
persuade you that diets don’t matter but
here’s my caveat what you feed your
microbes does matter our food most of it
is absorbed in our small intestines
that’s where it gets broken down by our
own enzymes gets into our bloodstream
and nourishes us but fiber which comes
from plant foods passes straight through
it can’t be broken down by us and so it
goes on to our large intestines and
there it feeds our microbes and as a
result of that they can then give us the
benefit
of the chemicals that they produce from
that food so those chemicals calm our
immune systems they tell us that we feel
full they even send messages to our
brains to make us feel happy and they
control how much fat our fat cells store
crucially so we know that in our
ancestors ate around 100 to 200 grams of
fiber – per day but we in the West
struggle to eat 20 grams of fiber per
day so our microbes are really missing
out on their food source and we know it
matters to you when you add fiber to the
diets of mice who are being fed at an
extremely high fat diet they resist
obesity and humans who have a lower
fiber intake are more likely to be
overweight so what I want you to take
away is that we are looking at obesity
the wrong way around
we’ve been dieting we’ve been exercising
we’ve been blaming ourselves for our
sinful greedy lazy nature’s and none of
it’s working so maybe we should be
looking at it the other way around and
thinking about our microbes and other
things that are affecting our biology
and changing the way we store fat and
perhaps that then goes on to make us
want to eat more because we’re not
getting the benefit of that energy one
thing’s for sure if you look after your
microbes you’re looking after yourself
thank you [Applause]
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