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By Sharon Begley | Reuters – 3 hrs ago

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The logic behind weight-loss surgery seems simple: rearrange the digestive tract so the stomach can hold less food and the food bypasses part of the small intestine, allowing fewer of a meal's calories to be absorbed. Bye-bye, obesity.

A study of lab mice, published on Wednesday, begs to differ. It concludes that one of the most common and effective forms of bariatric surgery, called Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, melts away pounds not - or not only - by re-routing the digestive tract, as long thought, but by changing the bacteria in the gut.

Or, in non-scientific terms, the surgery somehow replaces fattening microbes with slimming ones.

If that occurs in people, too, then the same bacteria-changing legerdemain achieved by gastric bypass might be accomplished without putting obese patients under the knife in an expensive and risky operation.

"These elegant experiments show that you can mimic the action of surgery with something less invasive," said Dr. Francesco Rubino of Catholic University in Rome and a pioneer in gastric-bypass surgery. "For instance, you might transfer bacteria or even manipulate the diet" to encourage slimming bacteria and squelch fattening kinds, said Rubino, who was not involved in the study.

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They first performed Roux-en-Y on obese mice. As expected, the animals quickly slimmed down, losing 29 percent of their weight and keeping it off, the researchers report in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

To make sure there was not something about the general experience of surgery, rather than gastric bypass specifically, that affected the animals, the scientists performed "sham" Roux-en-Y on other obese mice. In this procedure, the researchers made incisions as if they were going to do a gastric bypass, but instead connected everything up as nature had it.

The researchers then transferred gut microbiota from the Roux-en-Y mice to microbe-free obese mice. Result: the recipient mice lost weight and fat - no surgery required. Crucially, obese mice that received gut bugs from mice that had received sham Roux-en-Y, not the real thing, did not slim down.

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Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.

Another new study found that figuring out whether you have slimming microbiota or fattening ones might be as easy as breathing.

In a study published on Tuesday in the online edition of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles report that people whose breath has high concentrations of both hydrogen and methane gases are more likely to have a higher body mass index and higher percentage of body fat.

Methane is associated with bacteria called Methanobrevibacter smithii, which in overabundance may cause weight gain by extracting calories from food super-efficiently, Cedars' Ruchi Mathur, who led the study, said: "It could allow a person to harvest more calories from their food."

The breath test could provide a warning that someone is at risk of obesity because he harbors fattening microbiota.

It could also validate what many overweight people have long suspected: if their slim friends eat two slices of bacon-cheeseburger pizza the 600 calories go through them like celery, but if the overweight person indulges then every calorie seems to turn into more fat. People absorb different quantities of calories from the exact same food, thanks to their gut microbiota.

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