What urine reveals about obesity

To glean that insight, researchers sifted through the urine samples of 2,195 men and women (ages 40 to 59) who ranged across the weight spectrum for the telltale metabolites of obesity. In all, they found 29 chemical metabolites -- the by-products of physiological processes that proceed unseen inside the body -- whose levels variously rose and fell with people's BMI. The result is a "network map" which could serve as a "metabolic signature" for the modern obesity epidemic, the authors said. To the uninitiated, the network map looks like an air traffic controller's worst nightmare: a tangle of hundreds of chemicals that interact with one another in myriad ways. But to those devising ways to protect the obese from the health consequences of their condition, any of those overlapping nodes could contain the secret passageway to success. Among the most notable metabolites they found linked to obesity were those produced by bacteria that colonize the gut, the latest in a flurry of research findings that implicate the gut's microbiome to in obesity and metabolic disease. Other metabolites suggest that the skeletal muscle of obese people uses energy differently than does that of people of normal healthy weight. http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-urine-obesity-20150429-story.html