I’m just surprised at the kink-negative headline
Ever since Stephen Maturin had grown rich with their first prize he had constantly laid in great quantities of asafoetida, castoreum and other substances, to make his medicines more revolting in taste, smell and texture than any others in the fleet; and he found it answered—his hardy patients knew with their entire beings that they were being physicked.
— Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander.
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Changing my behavior and lifestyle is hard. Nah, I’m going to keep looking for one weird trick.
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Wow, way to minimize the struggle of people who want to lose weight or have been told they must by doctors who should be well aware that permanent weight loss without surgery is almost impossible for most people. If a fecal transplant can cause someone to become obese why wouldn’t the reverse be possible?
Of course a DIY transplant is beyond risky but do you have any idea the things obese people are willing to try when all the conventional advice has failed them time and time again? You think fat people are lazy? I will show you people who have starved themselves and worked out until they puked only to have the weight come back if they take even a small break.
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The very idea is based on a complete confusion of cause and effect. Research HAS shown that obese people and healthy people have different populations of digestive bacteria in their guts. Idiots jump to the conclusion that if they change their got biome they’ll lose weight. But of course different bacteria populations will dominate in a gut dominated by big-macs and twinkies than a gut that mostly sees vegetables. I suppose that under the proper conditions, the introduction of different gut bacteria MIGHT be a helpful adjunct to adjusting to a sudden, radical change in diet, but in the absence of that change, it will do nothing to help one lose weight.
Man Decides To Investigate A Hole In His Backyard Backside — And What He Finds Is Absolutely Terrifying.
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Absolutely! But the problem is not whether it can work. The problem is the unpredictability of the results without extensive biome analysis. I don’t think he means to minimize the greater struggle with this post, so much as to minimize the seeming miraculous nature of poop.
I think researchers are slowly realizing that the human body is a whole system full of complex interacting parts, a good many of which are actually microbes, and health/disease has to be understood in the context of that system. I think the idea is sound. But the issue is, we are many, many years from really understanding a system that complex. So in the interim, we have theories and techniques that are, at best, just on the plausible side of wacko. Augmenting your colon with someone else’s waste is clearly a crude and simplistic way of altering your body’s environment and … well, it could work, I guess, but it isn’t really based on a deep understanding of what that is going to do to you at a molecular and cell level, much less what the side effects are going to be. There’s a lot of research connecting autism to the digestive system, too, but I have always been a little skeptical about that. There are lots of non-medical people who totally believe that though.
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In the spirit of santorum, I propose we call this, ahem, method, gooping.
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the risk of transferring diseases like Hepititus or HIV from one poo owner to another is pretty high
Err, isn’t the risk only high if the person you’re getting the feces from has hepatitis or HIV? This line just seems like fear-mongering.
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Geez, does everybody but me and Seamus hate alliterative onomatopoeia?
Placing public poop inside your person might be a piss poor plan, but prior preparation and physician presence might mitigate many a misfortune.
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There’s lot of work to be done. I think that once it’s well understood, replacing existing gut flora with better, but already existing strains will be only a step to new strains of microbes that could be engineered for maximum health benefits.
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That bothered me too. we don’t do blood transfusions from totally unknown sources, amd we don’t let strangers om the bus breastfeed our babies. If people totally willy-nilly getting blackmarket/blackbox poop is the issue, say that. If I got some from my wife, who could digest a box of iron nails and never gets sick, I don’t think I’m likely to pick up anything I wouldn’t have in…other ways.
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The Soviet space program was doing that in the 1970s, you know. They were studying gut ecology at least as early as 1971 and I believe they began actively experimenting with replacement digestive bacteria for cosmonauts shortly thereafter.
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I wouldn’t ordinarily stoop to one, but perhaps the persistent, pervasive, pungent, putrid perfume of poop in this place provides powerful provocations for plosive paronomasia.
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New life plan…
- move out to the country
- be artisinal
- eat organic
- sell my shit
- profit!
eventually leading to…
- cause scandal when my shit becomes too popular and I start supplementing it with cow dung
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I’m probably going to spend the rest of my day trying to figure out how to work “plosive paronomasia” into a business memo to my boss. Uh, thanks?
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I find it curious that we had two people (@Megan_Lane_Patrick, @HomeBoy) register with BB just to express displeasure with this article. Usually that only happens on articles about flashpoint topics like neo-Nazis or gun control. I wonder whether Sean’s article got a mention in some ShitSwappers forum.
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Something I didn’t like about this post - it ends up saying fecal transplants can be a sensible idea if done in a medical context by professionals, which does seem to be the case, but it starts out implying that they’re a terrible idea in general. It would have been better and less clickbaity to lead with a “don’t try this at home” or the like
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