A few years ago, Liping Zhao, a microbiologist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, put a man with a body mass index of 58.8 - classified as very severely obese - on a strict diet. Over the course of 6 months, the man shed more than 50 kg. In addition, a group of bacteria known as Entero-bacter became undetectable in his stool samples, even though they had previously made up 35% of the microbes in his gut. The decline and fall of a set of bacteria might seem incidental to the man's impressive weight loss, but Zhao and many other researchers say that the human gut microbiota - the assortment of 1,000 or so species of bacteria that inhabit our digestive tract - has an important role in regulating body weight.
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