If you’ve ever rebounded from a diet by reaching for chips or sweets, your gut microbes may be partly to blame.
A new study from researchers in France has found that repeated dieting — cycling between healthy eating and high-fat, high-sugar foods — can change the gut microbiome in ways that lead to binge eating. In mice, this “yo-yo” pattern of eating caused not just weight fluctuations, but compulsive overconsumption of junk food.
The research team took things a step further. They transferred gut microbes from binge-eating mice into healthy mice. The result? The healthy mice started showing the same compulsive eating behaviors, suggesting that changes in the microbiota alone were enough to influence eating patterns.
Brain changes followed, too. The mice with altered gut microbes showed increased activity in the brain’s reward system and structural changes in the brainstem, where signals from the gut are processed.
While these findings are based on animal studies, they add to a growing body of evidence that gut health plays a powerful role in eating behavior and weight regulation. The researchers say more human studies are needed, but the implications are clear: weight loss efforts that ignore the gut microbiome may be missing a big piece of the puzzle.
The study, which was published in Advanced Science, was led by scientists from several French research institutions, including INRAE (France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment), CNRS (the National Centre for Scientific Research), the University of Rennes and Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté. It was supported by national facilities focused on animal research and nutrition, including teams specializing in infectious disease and dietary fats.