Yes, the bacteria in your digestive tract are making your food choices for you. The microbes don't want macrobiotic; oh, no, they want pizza and beer, and lots and lots of chocolate. There was a show of little bacterial hands, and that's the choices they made. They nixed the eggplant and limberger cheese casserole, though. And perhaps you should thank them for that.WASHINGTON - If that craving for chocolate sometimes feels like it is coming from deep in your gut, that's because maybe it is.
A small study links the type of bacteria living in people's digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate's allure.
That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.
The story notes that they had trouble finding eleven men who don't each chocolate at all. One wonders how much more difficult it would have been to find eleven women who never eat chocolate.
