You＇ve probably learned that bears eat a lot before hibernating（冬眠），putting on weight suddenly. It's an enviable practice, because those bears don't have the same health problems as fat people. A study published in Cell Reports has found that it might be due to the bear＇s friendly gut microbes（肠道细菌）.
In summer, bears go through an extreme period of eating, while they eat nothing about six months during winter hibernation. To compare the microbiomes of both seasons, the researchers collected the samples of their waste from 16 wild bears during hibernation and in summer. What they found is that the bear's lifestyle changes dramatically with seasons. During hibernation, the kinds of microbiomes became less than the summer samples.
To find out how that might affect metabolism（新陈代谢），the researchers transferred the microbes from the winter and the summer into lab mice. Mice with the summer microbes gained more weight than those with the winter microbes. However, those fatter summer mice weren't different from the winter mice in their glucose（葡萄糖）metabolism. ＂Thus， the bear may be atypical model for healthy obesity（肥胖） and studying hibernation might be a promising approach to developing new treatments for obesity," the authors write.
However,there are still more researches needed before humans benefit from bear gut microbes. The researchers note that relying on free-ranging wild bears means they know little about their food intake and other habits. And though they were able to produce interesting metabolic results in mice,mice are quite different from humans. And another research suggests that exposure to cold can also change the composition of gut bacteria, improving glucose metabolism and fat burning abilities in mice.
