- New research has identified a special type of gut bacteria found in elite athletes that may play a role in boosting their performance during rigorous exercise — and it could lead to a probiotic-like supplement that “regular joes” could use to enhance their performance in a few years.
by Jade Scipioni, CNBC.com
“The future of fitness is here and it’s something that we’re rapidly developing,” Jonathan Scheiman, former Harvard postdoctoral fellow and CEO and co-founder of FitBiomics. “We want to translate this into consumer products to promote health and wellness [to the masses].”
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine by 17 researchers, including Scheiman, found that, after they exercise, marathon runners and endurance athletes have higher levels of a bacteria called Veillonella in their digestive microbiomes (the unique colonies of bacteria that exist in your body) as compared to inactive individuals.
Researchers then isolated a strain of Veillonella from a marathon runner and inserted it into the colons of lab mice — they found the mice given Veillonella ran 13% longer on a treadmill compared to mice who were not given the bacteria.
“It might not seem like a huge number, but I definitely think its biologically significant and certainly if you ask a marathon runner, if they could increase their running ability by 13% — I think that they will be generally interested,” Aleksandar Kostic, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of microbiology at the Joslin Diabetes Center.
The group later did a second analysis of 87 ultra-marathoners and Olympic-trial rowers and found similarly high levels of Veillonella. It appears that Veillonella works by feeding of off lactic acid, a compound produced in the muscles during exercise. The bacteria then turns into a compound called propionate (a common short-chain fatty acid), which may aid in boosting one’s athletic performance, researchers say.
While there’s much more research to be done (the concept hasn’t been tested on humans yet), Scheiman left Harvard a little more than a year ago after working on the study for four years to launch FitBiomics with several study co-authors from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
His team at the New York-based early stage start-up (which is venture funded and also has a slew of private investors) is currently developing a prototype of a probiotic supplement containing Veillonella from elite athletes for commercial use. He says it will most likely be purified into a supplement that can be used in a variety of food and beverage formats.
However, he has no firm timetable on when he expects the products will be ready for human trials. “Science takes time. Since its a probiotic, we’re not necessarily reinventing the wheel here, we’re just sort of disrupting and evolving it,” he says. “Obviously, we want to do human studies but I think the future of fitness is here.”
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