Fat keeps the body warm, so it stands to reason that people living far from the equator have more body fat. A new study says that could be because people who live farther North have more obesity-related microbes in their guts.
Researchers at UC Berkeley studied the proportions of two particular types of gut bacteria in stomachs around the world: Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. Previous studies have shown that people with a lot of Firmicutes and very little Bacteroidetes are more likely to be obese.
By gleaning medical data from half a dozen previous studies (1,020 healthy people living in 23 different locations) the researchers found that, in general, a person who lived more poleward hosted more obesity-related bacteria than their equatorial counterparts. Thus a Swedish person's microbiota, for instance, was higher in Firmicutes and lower in Bacteroidetes as compared to the gut of someone living in Malawi. This held true ...
