I recently stumbled across some research into how gut bacteria may help regulate body temperature (a.k.a. thermoregulation). As someone who has the body temperature regulation skills of a tropical plant, I was intrigued.
According to a recent article, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found evidence that the gut microbiota play an important role in thermoregulation. The first thing to understand is that animals have two types of fat: white adipose tissue (WAT), and brown adipose tissue (BAT). Essentially, when animals need to produce more heat in order to sustain their body temperature, they activate BAT. WAT can also be transformed into BAT through a process appropriately titled “browning.” The Chinese researchers found that when mice lacked a healthy microbiome in their gut, both these functions were impaired. They hypothesized that the microbiome-less mice could not properly digest enough food to combat the increased energy demands of cold temperatures, and the effect on BAT was a consequence of this. If that is true, then the microbiome has a secondary effect on BAT (which means that improving my own body temperature regulations skills is probably more complicated than eating some probiotics).
Another study from a few years prior to the above suggested that the absence of gut microbiota promotes fat breakdown and inhibits fat buildup, which would definitely affect thermoregulation.
Conversely, a Swiss study found that mice with a normal microbiome were more prone to obesity than their antibiotic-treated comrades, which would suggest (contrary to most comparable research papers) that an impaired microbiome actually improved the health of the mice.
Of course, these studies were conducted on mice, and the same may or may not be true for humans.
Thermoregulation appears to be yet another area in which the microbiome plays an important role, and more research is definitely called for.
Microbial Mood 