Cannot Stop Eating Desserts? It may be Your Gut Bacteria!

Ever felt like trying a cookie or biscuit just to see how it tastes and then found yourself unable to stop eating until finish the whole plate? If your answer is yes, you are not alone, and the culprit may be the natural guest of your digestive system at work.

Scientists have found that specific gut bacteria are responsible for the binge eating behaviour in mice.

Mice are known to enjoy “palatable foods” just as much as humans. This term is used for describing foods that we consume solely for hedonistic pleasure, not to satiate our hunger or get the nutrients our body needs. Sugary snacks are the most common type of such palatable foods.

Researchers from Caltech demonstrated that the presence of certain gut bacteria in mice suppress their desire to binge eat palatable foods. To test this, they gave antibiotics to a group of mice for four weeks to disrupt their gut microbiota (the species of microscopic life forms living in the gut) and compared their feeding behaviour with normal mice that host normal gut microbiota.

The group of mice that lost certain species of gut bacteria as a result of antibiotic usage were observed to consume twice the amount of sugar pellets compared to those with normal gut bacteria. Furthermore, these mice returned to normal feeding behaviour after their microbiotas were restored through fecal transplants. Throughout the study, both groups of mice consumed the same amount of their standard regular diet, suggesting that the behaviour is only about palatable foods.

The gut microbiota contains hundreds of bacterial species, and the team set out to figure out which species were more influential in driving binge eating behaviour. They found that bacteria from the family S24-7 (a type of bacteria specific to lab mice) and certain Lactobacillus species were highly associated with reduced “sweets” cravings. When they gave these specific bacterial species to the group of mice, whose microbiota was disrupted due to antibiotic treatment, binge-eating behaviour was really suppressed.

The gut bacteria have been linked to a number of behaviours and diseases, both in mice and in humans, and this study just adds one more solid entry to the list. It may also serve as a model study –one day- to understand and interpret how and why we may be driven to overuse alcohol, nicotine, or other substances that bring pleasure. “I think it would be so intriguing to see if people given oral antibiotics exhibit differences in their eating patterns and dietary choices, and whether these things can be associated with the gut microbiota,” says James Ousey, who led the study.