The Food for Gut Flora is the First Priority in the Development of Innovative Functional Food

Chenggang Zhang

School of Life Sciences, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing 102488, China; Email: jxs@bucm.edu.cn; Address: Yangguang South Street, Liangxiang Higher Education Park, Fangshan District, Beijing

ABSTRACT:

Food is the first-of-all need in our human life. However, our body will be suffered to chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes if we eat too much food for a long time. On the contrary, if there is no enough food, we will feel uncontrollable hunger sensation. With rapid progress of scientific researches, the truth behind hunger sensation is gradually emerging, where the gut flora was involved in food eating behavior of human beings. During our researches in recent 10 years, we found for the first time that human hunger sensation comes from gut flora. This study was initially carried out because of the obesity of my own body. When I try to control the body weight to avoid diabetes caused by obesity, I found that the food for gut flora could surprisingly reduce the hunger sensation. After many further studies, we finally found that it is the gut flora but not our human brain created the hunger sensation to our human body by destroying the human mucosa. When we eat some functional foods such as natural plant polysaccharides and dietary fiber which could not be utilized by human itself, the hunger sensation was gradually reduced and even disappeared. We called this kind of special life style as flexible fasting (FF) and found that the human body could directly use the glycogen and fat stored in our body to provide energy for daily life. Normally, the gut flora comes into the human body only after baby birth. From the perspective of gut flora, in addition to obtaining carbon source from gastrointestinal mucosa for their reproduction, what other options are available? Therefore, a new understanding has been formed that gut flora provides hunger sensation to our human body and guiding our eating behavior in order to avoid the gut flora digests our gastrointestinal mucosa directly. Taken together, out studies indicated that the food for gut flora is the first priority in the development of innovative functional food.

BIOGRAPHY:

Chenggang Zhang was born in Baishui, Shaanxi Province in Sep 27, 1970. He obtained the bachelor's degree in Fudan University, the master's degree in the Fourth Military Medical University, the doctor's degree in the Third Military Medical University, and completed the postdoctoral research in the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. He worked in the Academy of Military Medical Sciences for 20 years. He is now a professor of School of Life Sciences, Beijing University of traditional Chinese Medicine. His major interests focus on the relation between gut flora and prevention and control of chronic diseases, as well as the traditional Chinese medicine studies from the perspective of life science.