Expanding Guts in Pythons and People
Regular readers of this blog might remember a post I wrote a few months ago about weight-loss surgery. A mouse study suggested that surgery works — triggering weight loss and, often, diabetes remission — not because it makes the stomach smaller, but because it drastically changes its biochemistry.
I took a close look at that study and a slew of others in a feature published in today’s issue of Nature. Rodent models have shown that after surgery, the gut goes through many dramatic changes. Bacterial compositions shift, for example, bile acids flow more freely, and the intestines swell.
That last bit maybe isn’t so surprising — after all, once the stomach shrinks to the size of an egg, suddenly a whole lot more undigested food is going to hit the intestines than before. But what is surprising, as Nicholas Stylopoulos’s group published last year in Science, is that this abrupt growth seems to trigger a host of permanent metabolic changes in the gut.
As I explain in the feature:
“The rapid growth requires a lot of energy, which comes from glucose. Glucose uptake by the changing organ increases, and the change is maintained over time, Stylopoulos says. ‘Essentially, the intestine becomes a bigger and a more hungry organ that needs more glucose than before.’Stylopoulos believes that this tissue growth in the gut is the main driver of the surgery’s remarkable metabolic benefits — not a reduction in calorie intake.”
A couple of weeks ago, while I was doing the final fact-checks for the feature, Stylopoulos told me a fun tidbit about how the same sort of change has been reported in….wait for it….Burmese Pythons. “They have some amazing similarities,” he said.
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