 Other than fiber, what else do plants make that animals don't that could help account for how dramatically slimmer those who eat plant-based diets tend to be? Phytonutrients. Mammals, including humans, harbor two main types of friendly gut bacteria— bacterioidities and formicudes. In terms of obesity, though, one appears friendlier than the other. There is mounting evidence that the gut flora is different in healthy patients than disin obese patients, which primarily involves higher numbers of formicudes than bacterioidities phyla in the case of obesity and overweight. So just to keep them straight, you can remember fatter formicudes and bonier bacterioidities. Obese individuals appear to have more formicudes than bacterioidities in their guts. If you put people on a diet for a year, you can actually change their proportion. Give people certain antibiotics may actually trigger obesity because you're mucking around down there. How can we improve our ratio? Well, there is a class of phytonutrients called polyphenols that do two things. They preferentially feed bacterioidities, while at the same time suppressing the growth of formicudes. So the researchers were like, hey, maybe that's why the use of vinegar has been recommended for thousands of years for weight loss. What's it often made out of? Red wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, both of which, look, grapes and apples, packed with polyphenols. The weight-lowing property of fruits, green tea, wine vinegar, and obese people may be partly related to the polyphenol content of them, which consequently changes the gut flora, which may consequently alter the balance between the two groups of bacterioidities and formicudes bacteria in the favor of bacterioidities. It's funny. Naysayers of the power of phytonutrients often point to studies like this, showing that up to 85% of those wonderful blue anthocyanins and blueberries end up in your colon unabsorbed. But that may be exactly where some of the magic happens.