Obesity caused by Bacteria

From a Cell article summary:

Gut Bacteria Go Rogue
Although the nonpathogenic bacteria in our guts are traditionally thought of
as commensal—that is, they derive nutrients from our meals without directly
disturbing our overall health—accumulating evidence indicates that these
microscopic residents contribute significantly to the development of meta-
bolic disorders, such as diabetes and obesity. What transforms these friendly
inhabitants into harmful foes? Wang et al. (2010) now tackle this question
in their new study. They show that Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5), which is
expressed on the surface of intestinal cells in mammals, promotes metabolic
health partially by regulating the composition of the gut microflora. TLR5 is
a critical component of the innate immune system in mammals and specifi-
cally recognizes molecular components of bacterial flagella. The authors
find that engineering mice to lack TLR5 induced symptoms that are similar
to metabolic syndrome in humans, including overeating, obesity, and insulin
resistance. Remarkably, antibiotic treatments that decimated 90% of the gut
bacteria in these mice almost completely resolved their metabolic problems.
Meanwhile, transplanting the gut microflora of the TLR5-deficient mice into
germ-free wild-type mice disrupted the metabolic health of the transplanted
animals, producing symptoms similar to those exhibited by the TLR5-defi-
cient mice. Thus, the composition of the bacterial species that initially
colonizes our guts at birth may have a significant impact
on our metabolic health later in life. Further, metabolic disorders stemming
from the current obesity epidemic may be due, in
part, to the breakdown in communication between the gut microflora
and components of our innate immune system.

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Ignore weird spacing issues, but its kind of interesting bacteria affect your obesity and overeating habits... Its like they're taking us over!