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In Search Of A Healthy Gut, One Man Turned To An Extreme DIY Fecal Transplant (theverge.com)
Josiah Zayner writes: Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge followed Dr. Josiah Zayner, a former Scientist at NASA turned BioHacker, as he attempted the first ever full-body microbiome transplant. She writes "Over the course of the next four days, Zayner would attempt to eradicate the trillions of microbes that lived on and inside his body -- organisms that helped him digest food, produce vitamins and enzymes, and protected his body from other, more dangerous bacteria. Ruthlessly and methodically, he would try to render himself into a biological blank slate. Then, he would inoculate himself with a friend's microbes -- a procedure he refers to as a 'microbiome transplant.'".
there, a poop joke
So unlike everybody who commented before me here (just ACs so far), I actually read what was written and apparently the experiment worked.
I've been running an experiment of my own for 21 years now. For the first 8 years only ate raw veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds. For the last 13 years eating cooked food, only veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds but also cheeses, yoghurt and some breads.
I think people should be free to experiment with their own bodies, we only live once. Some people climb rocks, others eat shit, who knows, maybe something will come out of it. I personally would like to go through the DNA procedure to increase the length of the telomeres like that lady in South America did, I don't want to wait for any government approval for any of it, it's my life.
You can't handle the truth.
Totally different, probiotics usually have assorted bacteria that are usually not associated with a healthy or unhealthy gut. Microbiomes, like those of the gut function as communities meaning you can't just add one or two species and hope everything is better(at least not from what we know at the moment). Using a fresh poop sample increases the chances that not only will a transplant take but also that the beneficial microbes will be there in the appropriate amounts to be beneficial.
as Slashdot's Disable Advertising toggle lately. Being eligible doesn't mean it's functional.
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There are other ways to adjust the bacteria present, such as through diet.
That worked for me. A few years ago I bought a $39 yogurt maker from Amazon, and started eating a bowl fresh from the incubator every morning. As my gut bacteria changed, so did my appetite. I no longer craved sugar or other carbs, and started eating more fiber and veggies. I guess the little critters were using some sort of chemical feedback to make me eat a diet more to their liking. I am about 5 pounds lighter, have more energy, and have had no gut problems (diarrhea, constipation, or pain) in years.
Official studies need to happen and soon. We need to find out if sterilizing the gut is actually necessary. In many cases it may be possible to transform an existing gut into another just with fecal matter. We also need to know more about the component bacteria. It is likely possible we could artificially culture a healthy gut biome in an artificial gut. We just need the bacteria and it needs to become tasteless like a powder added to food.
And cravings and the gut biome need to be thoroughly analyzed. And eating it might not be the ideal to replicate a biome; the digestion in the stomach could kill some bacteria but not others and or alter the concentrations.
And of course it works. Come on people think. How much do people spend on diets? Once everyone figures out they can lose significant weight this way it will catch on like wildfire. Everyone with gut problems.. would you rather continue to suffer or eat a little shit?
Probiotics also come with disclaimers that their effects are unproven.
Contrary to what the FA suggests, some experiments with fecal transplants to treat various other conditions have been done. Although most available data is anecdotal, there is evidence that they could be the best treatment for obesity, and a possible cure for type 1 diabetes and other auto immune conditions. See, for instance, some views of Dr. Jeffrey Gordon
Except that yoghurt is primarily made from yeast
No. This is wrong. Yogurt is made with bacteria. You can read all about it on Wikipedia, where the very first sentence explains that yogurt is made with bacterial fermentation.
any bacteria it has are very unlikely to be bacteria normally found in the gut.
Wrong again. Many of the bacteria commonly found in yogurt are also found in mammalian guts. Here is one example but there are many others.
No, the live cultures in yogurt are bacteria. Perhaps the confusion is in that yogurt production is referred to as fermentation, and we usually associate that word with the action of yeast in alcoholic beverages. But fermentation just means anaerobic metabolism, and it occurs in yeast, some species of bacteria, and even animals when muscles work faster than they can pull in oxygen from the blood. The byproduct of yeast fermentation is ethanol, and the byproduct of bacteria and muscle fermentation is lactic acid, which is what makes yogurt sour, and makes muscles ache after sprinting without a cool down.
You are probably right that the yogurt bacteria are not those usually found in the gut. But the presence of those bacteria may be beneficial in the gut flora due to being non harmful, while being competitive against other bacteria which are.
Probiotics contain nothing that resembles fecal bacteria. If they did, they'd be immediately removed from the shelves.
Probiotics are mostly a way to seperate people from their money.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Depends on the priobiotic. But just because there are common strains of bacteria as that in the gut doesn't mean they would be pulled from the market. There is nothing wrong with consuming bacteria, we do it all the time. The problem is with specific species in specific quantities. Now the FDA isn't going to allow a probiotic on the market that contains salmonella, but lactobacillus they wouldn't care about nor should they, it's common in your gut and common in food you eat. There are several varieties of probiotics that contain up to 20 different strains that are common in the gut. The problem is, as others have already said, the colony in your gut is probably more than a 100 separate species of bacteria that all work in concert. A slight mismatch in the quantities of the various strains can cause it not to function or to function completely differently.
There is a lot of interesting research been done recently that says people that are overweight and can't loose weight have problems with their bacterial colonies, key bacteria are missing and there are others in much higher quantities that you don't' find in a health persons gut. There is actually research being done on this right now to find out if poop transplants can make people healthier.
It's entirely possible that these gut microbiomes affect far more than we realize.
Actually, the bacteria in yogurt were originally cultured from people putting milk in animal stomachs used as bladders to hold liquids. They are directly from mammalian stomachs. This is also where cheese comes from and probably almost every single dairy product other than plain milk.
Yep. Animal bladders or 'sacs' were either dog food, or the perfect canteen for our paleolithic ancestors.
Someone let a batch sit too long in a cave, and discovered yogurt. Then later cheese, probably.
I mean, in the Stone Ages, people didn't just phone up Sigma-Aldrich for a "disinfected ruminant stomach number three", or whatever. It was a little less hygienic then.
I had a doctor tell me to eat a lot of yogurt once, in order to replenish bacteria after having an antibiotic treatment.
That doctor is clearly in the pocket of Big Yogurt and cannot be trusted.
At the moment there don’t seem to be many biome treatments, but the recent availability of inexpensive bacterial profiling makes me hope to see some in the next decade. The British Gut Project will profile your microbiome for £75 (see http://britishgut.org./ Fecal transplants into animals have shown persistent changes to (for example) the tendency to obesity. There’s a chance Zayner will keep his improved gut health. I know that people with psoriasis show changes to the skin and gut biomes and have heard many anecdotes of symptom relief after taking probiotics, so I recently asked a skin specialist if there were any trials I could ask to join. No. For the time being abstaining from alcohol and exercising are helping and I don’t feel stuck enough to plan my own FMT.
RTFA. He had tried diet alteration already. Though granted, probably not thoroughly given his somewhat casual proclivities. Not that I can blame him: chronic intestinal distress eats away at your willpower and mental acuity quite severely over time. It's very hard to stay rational with a constant worm in your stomach. I can totally sympathize with the level of desperation that drove him to this. So, if doctor's don't want us nearly-schizophrenic IBS-ravaged patients turning to crazy DYI procedures, getting this area of medicine more science and evidence should be a priority, rather than giving us diazepam-laced anti-cholergenic cocktails, probably an antidepressant, and telling us to "avoid stress" (hah!), essentially treating it as a purely neurological problem.
Someone had to do it.