Researchers at the Capital Institute of Pediatrics in Beijing found a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae that produces unusually large amounts of alcohol from ordinary carbohydrates, effectively brewing a drink inside the gut of people who had not been drinking at all.
Screening 43 Chinese patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, the team found this high-alcohol-producing Klebsiella strain in up to 60 percent of cases. Feeding the bacteria to mice, or transplanting stool containing the strain, gave the mice fatty liver disease; removing the strain before transplant prevented it.
The finding does not mean every case of fatty liver comes from gut bacteria, and the bacterial link was strongest in this one Chinese cohort rather than shown globally. It does reframe a disease usually pinned on diet and drinking as something a specific microbe can cause on its own, by manufacturing the very substance the liver damage is blamed on.
Read the original study
Yuan et al., Cell Metabolism, 2019 · doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.11.006
The damage looked like drinking nobody poured.
Source
- Yuan, J., Chen, C., Cui, J., Lu, J., Yan, C., Wei, X., Zhao, X., Li, N., Li, S., Xue, G., Cheng, W., Li, B., Li, H., Lin, W., Tian, C., Zhao, J., Han, J., An, D., Zhang, Q., . . . Liu, D. (2019). Fatty Liver Disease Caused by High-Alcohol-Producing Klebsiella pneumoniae. Cell Metabolism, 30(6), 1172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.11.006