A helping of culture might be just the ticket for treating an increasingly common liver problem that's been linked to overactive bacteria in the intestines. Culture of the yogurt kind, that is. Johns Hopkins researchers say they've found that fatty liver disease in obese people might be the result of fermentation in the bowels that triggers potentially deadly chemical changes in the liver. Fatty liver disease is on the rise in this country as ever more Americans struggle with obesity and obesity-related diabetes. Nearly one in four people in the industrial world has a liver overrun with fat cells, mostly the result of being overweight, experts say.
Alcoholism is another cause.
As many as 10 percent of the people who have chronic fatty liver disease will die from it within a decade, they predict. Yet, whether the malady is linked to liquor or obesity, tissue samples from people with fatty liver disease look the same, the researchers say. This prompted Dr. Anna Mae Diehl, a Johns Hopkins gut specialist, and her colleagues to wonder whether internal distilleries might not be at work in obese people. The intestines might be acting as a living still, they theorized, with the bacteria that colonize them converting sugars into alcohol. The researchers looked for signs of alcohol, in this case ethanol, in the breath of obese and lean mice who ate an alcohol-free diet for six months.