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Comment by jungletime | Hacker News Reader

I wonder to what extent is Obesity contagious. If you can improve your gut bacteria, surely you can make it worse. Can you pick up gut bacteria from Obese people. Maybe going to the gym helps you lose weight because you touch surfaces and pick up bacteria from fit people. And so on. Just conjecture.

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Seems like in the next few years might see some more information about fecal transplants for obesity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5045147/

There is ongoing investigation in this area on mother-child transfers of gut bacteria that may influence body weight. The evidence seems to be pointing to diet influencing the type of bacteria that thrive in the gut - so my gut (ha ha) says that a few bacteria entering the gut won’t change things - you need to more or less farm them.

I don’t think obesity itself is contagious (unless you’re mucking about in an obese person’s fecal matter). My hunch is antibiotic usage disrupts your gut biome enough that it pushes your energy extraction balance off, causing obesity.

As a society, we abuse antibiotics in the aggregate (demanding it from health care providers and pouring it into factory farms). It can’t possibly not be disrupting our guy biome.

It also doesn’t help that the sugar lobby/industry is so powerful, and sugar/corn syrup is in everything.

I don't think it's the energy extraction that's changing, but people's set points for weight.

> It also doesn’t help that the sugar lobby/industry is so powerful, and sugar/corn syrup is in everything.

Corn syrup ain't good, but we have fat people in other parts of the world, too.

Rapidly increasing obesity rates seem to be associated with a first world/western diet.

Further investigation seems useful.

Eg anecdotally I can see people in India putting on the pounds much more than Chinese---whether on the mainland or in South-East Asia like Singapore. But I don't know the statistics off the top of my head, I only lived there.

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