To Combat Type 2 Diabetes, Should You Cultivate Better Gut Bacteria?If you are anything like the average person, you carry approximately six pounds (2.7 kg) of bacteria in your stomach and intestines.

They perform some healthy functions, like the absorption of carbohydrates and the destruction of potentially harmful bacteria. But they can also cause obesity and type 2 diabetes.

A new study reveals some of the weirdest results I’ve ever read about when gut bacteria of a type 2 diabetic was inserted into the stomach of someone without type 2 diabetes.

Scientists have long known that type 2 diabetics and pre-diabetics have different gut bacteria from those who are metabolically healthy. As is always the case with such a finding, they then had to discover whether the bacteria caused the diabetes or whether the diabetes caused the particular bacterial changes.

Related research on mice gives a clue. Some ingenious researchers planted gut bacteria from lean and obese mice into the guts of mice that were raised completely germ-free. After a little as two weeks, the mice populated with the “obese bacteria” were putting on a lot of fat and weight compared to those with the “lean bacteria,” even though they were eating exactly the same diet. This clearly demonstrates that bodies that host certain types of gut bacteria process food and fat differently from those with other types of gut bacteria.

This kind of transplant experiment would be unethical to replicate on human beings, for obvious reasons, but if we assume it is true for humans too, we have an explanation for the differences between the bacterial collections of diabetics and non-diabetics. Our gut bacteria affect the way our bodies process food.

Experts have proposed a few ways in which certain types of gut bacteria can cause diabetes. These are three examples:

1. They increase the calories that you extract from your food, which increases the amount of fat you store. Stored fat promotes insulin resistance.

2. They increase the amount of glucose you extract from your food, which causes blood sugar spikes and increases your chance of developing insulin resistance.

3. They promote chronic inflammation that, in turn, causes insulin resistance.

In 2015, a research team at the Joslin Diabetes Center published an article in the journal Cell Metabolism that investigated the link between genetics and gut bacteria. They conducted their studies on mice as well because of the reasonably accurate generalizations that apply to humans.

Their findings were disturbing, because they cast some doubt on our ability to cultivate gut bacteria that can prevent diabetes.

They showed that our response to gut bacteria was partly genetically determined. When they transplanted bacteria from mice genetically prone to diabetes to mice genetically resistant to diabetes, those bacteria did not have equally destructive effects on the resistant mice.

In other words, bad bacteria are only bad if you already have a bad genetic makeup.

Luckily, the study did not prove that there were people, or mice, that were resistant to good bacteria, because that would be crushingly depressing.

There is little you can do to change your genetically determined gut bacterial responses to food, but some lifestyle changes will definitely help to cultivate good bacteria:

1. You can ensure that you carry mostly harmless gut bacteria by taking a probiotic supplement and by eating plenty of probiotic food like yogurt, sauerkraut, miso, and pickles.

2. Experts propose that a diverse bacterial colony is healthier than one in which only a few specific species rule because it increases the chance that the good and bad ones will be balanced. You can cultivate such a diverse bacterial population by eating a large variety of food types, including whole grains, pulses/legumes, nuts, seeds, root vegetables, leafy green vegetables, and fruit.

When my mother developed type 2 diabetes, one of the first things we did that worked was to boost her gut flora. Within just a few days, her blood sugar level completely changed.

But that was just the first step. Here is the complete 3-step strategy we used to completely reverse her type 2 diabetes, later proven by thousands of readers to work magic…