Beyond Weight Loss: How GLP-1 Agonists Influence Gut Bioenergetics and the Host Capacity Model — The Host Capacity Model: A Brief Overview

The Host Capacity Model proposes that many chronic patterns, including SIBO, MCAS, and long COVID, are not best interpreted as isolated microbial or immune problems. They are downstream consequences of a more upstream candidate mechanism: colonocyte bioenergetic compromise. When the cells lining the colon cannot generate adequate energy from butyrate oxidation, the oxygen gradient at the mucosal surface shifts, the microbial habitat changes, the barrier becomes more permissive, and immune signaling is amplified. The interpretive shift is from chasing the microbe to asking what conditions inside the host are recreating the niche the microbe occupies. None of this is diagnosis or treatment. It is a framework for clinician discussion.