Answer Questions
Answer Questions.
Dietary factors (an unhealthy diet).
Lifestyle (A sedentary lifestyle).
Genes (familial predisposition) (Wallis, 2014).
List four things that bacteria in our digestive system do to help us.
Digestion of plant fibers.
Influencing the storage of fat.
Influencing blood glucose levels.
Influencing response to hormones related to hunger (Wallis, 2014).
Of the four things you have listed above (answers 4-7) which is the best documented, the best understood scientifically?
The most understood and documented of the four activities is the digestion of plant fibers since bacteria have been found to digest organic materials both in vivo and in-vitro.
What are the two locations in the body that hold the most bacteria?
The Mouth.
The large intestines (Wallis, 2014).
Exactly when do we first start to assemble our “microbiota” A.K.A. “microbiome”?
A child acquires the first assembly of bacteria from the mother’s birth canal, and it is acquired during birth (Wallis, 2014).
What exactly do they mean by “census taking”? Give some examples.
This statement means that in the recent history, researchers have gained interest in determining the not only the number of microbes hosted by the human body but also the role that they play to influence human health. It also means that the researchers are getting interested in establishing not only the number of the microbes inhabiting the human body but also their effects on the overall health. As a result, the exact meaning of “Census taking” means the processes of establishing the exact number of bacteria hosted by human, by considering the total number of specific species in the human body (Wallis, 2014).
For example,
The total number of bacteria and the species occupying the mouth.
The total number of bacteria and the species occupying the large intestines.
The total number of bacteria and the species occupying the stomach.
List some criticisms of the validity of these findings (Melnyk and Morrison-Beedy, 2012).
The test subjects were not given the same food over the same period, and thus their comparison may not be applicable or valid.
The researcher did not outline the health characteristics of the respective test subjects. In this case, the subjects might have been characterized by different factors that led to differences in their body mass indexes.
The research did not consider the influence of genetic factors on weight gain.
“Which is more likely to cause obesity carbohydrates or fat consumption?” List four distinctly different confounding variable in an experiment like this (Melnyk and Morrison-Beedy, 2012).
Age of the subject individuals.
Sex/gender of the subject individuals.
Time of carbohydrate or fat intake of the subject individuals.
Genetic factors of an individual.
Gordon used humanized mice to increase result reliability and reduce variability. Gordon and his team selected genetically identical mice, raising them in a sterile environment to avoid bacterial infection. The germ-free mice were then divided into two groups and subjected to intestinal bacteria sourced from obese women and lean twin sisters, respectively. In addition, Gordon and his team used standard diets for the two groups. In the end, the group of mice with microbes obtained from obese women grew heavier and accumulated more body fat than the one where microbes had been sourced from a thin twin, and the fat mice were characterized by a less diverse microbial environment of the gut (Wallis, 2014). As a result, the experiment showed the cause-effect relationship of intestinal flora and obesity more reliably because genetic, dietary and housekeeping variables of the humanized mice were under the control of the researcher. In a different design of a humanized mice experiment, Gordon introduced microbes to baby mice from their respective twins and allowed them to share a cage. In this case, all mice became lean as an indication that the healthy varieties of microbes were transferred to all mice over time (Wallis, 2014). It also indicates that bacterial varieties responsible for leanness have stronger effect against those responsible for obesity.
References.
Melnyk, B. M., and Morrison-Beedy, D. (2012). Intervention research: Designing, conducting, analyzing, and funding. New York: Springer Publishing.
Wallis, C. (2014, June 1). How Gut Bacteria Help Make Us Fat and Thin. Retrieved July 02, 2016, from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-help-make-us-fat- and-thin/
