How Can You Make Money and Help Others with Your Shit?

How Can You Make Money and Help Others with Your Shit?
And other very important poop updates.


By Jesica Levingston Mac leod, PhD

First, you have to be a healthy pooper… Second, you have to live in the Boston area. Your stool can help a person suffering from recurrent C. difficile infections, which is a bacterium that affects 500,000 Americans every year. Where antibiotic treatment has failed to help, a new treatment called “fecal microbiota transplantation” has shown a cure rate of 90%. In this procedure, a fecal microbiota preparation using stool from a healthy donor is transplanted into the colon of the patient. OpenBiome, the startup company based in Boston, helps facilitate this procedure by screening and processing fecal microbiota preparations for use in this treatment. After joining the registration you and your stool will be screened and if you are healthy and a good candidate you will became a donor. If you can succeed with all the tests and you can provide “supplies” quite often then you can exchange money for you poo.

Lately, the study of the human microbiota has been all over the news, specially related with weight control, pregnancy and the infant’s diet. In fact, it’s estimated that the human gut contains 100 trillion bacteria, or 10 times as many bacteria as cells in the human body. Yes, I know what you are thinking: “More of them that my own cells, that cannot be right, right?”

These bacteria, or microbiota, influence your health in many ways, from helping to extract energy from food to building the body’s immune system, to protecting against infection with harmful, disease-causing bacteria.

Researchers are only just beginning to understand how differences in the composition of gut bacteria may influence human health. From what we know so far, here are five ways gut flora can affect your wellness:



Weight Changes
Yes, your gut bacteria affect your eating disorders (or orders if you are lucky). For example the diversity of gut bacteria is higher in lean people compared to obese people. Also, some specific bacteria groups, the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes, are linked with obesity. The famous study were they transplanted gut bacteria from obese and lean people to mice, making the host of the first kind of poo gain more weigh that the mice who received the “lean fecal bacteria”, was a shocking confirmation of the importance of the gut bacteria in the body weight regulation. They discovered that the gut bacteria from obese people increase the production of some amino acids, while the material from lean people increases the metabolism of “burning” carbohydrates.



Preterm Labor
Realman and col. found that pregnant women with lower levels of bacteria Lactobacillus in their vagina had an increased risk of preterm labor, compared with women whose vaginal bacterial communities were rich in Lactobacillus. Apparently, the absence of Lactobacillus allows the grown of other species that would have different effects in the pregnancy.



Crying Babies
In a funny study on how diet may affect babies, Pertty and col. showed that giving probiotics to your baby does not change the daily crying time, around 173 minutes, compare to the placebo group (174 min), according to the parental diary. They enrolled 30 infants with colic during the first 6 weeks of life. However, parents reported a decrease of 68% in daily crying in the probiotic and 49% in the placebo group.



Heart Attacks
Gut Bacteria produce compounds can even affect your heart. One of these compounds is the trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), and the presence of it in the blood of the subjects of a recent research study, increased 2.5 times the probability of having a heart attack, stroke or to die over a three-year period compared with people with low levels of TMAO. They have also shown that the metabolism of the gut bacteria changes according of the host’s (your) diet. For example, the consumption of high cholesterol and fatty food can increase the bacterial production of TMAO.



The Immune System
A recent review published in Cell rang the alarm about the negative effect of the “rich countries” diet in the microbiota influencing the immune system. In ideal and normal conditions the immune system-microbiota association allows the induction of protective responses to pathogens and the maintenance of regulatory pathways involved in the maintenance of tolerance to innocuous antigens. In rich countries, overuse of antibiotics, changes in diet, and elimination of constitutive partners, such as nematodes, may have selected for a microbiota that lack the resilience and diversity required to establish balanced immune responses. This phenomenon is proposed to account for some of the dramatic rise in autoimmune and inflammatory disorders in parts of the world where our symbiotic relationship with the microbiota has been the most affected.



Lungs and Asthma
The gut bacteria can affect your lungs: The low levels of 4 gut bacteria strains (Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella, and Rothia) in kids was been recently related to an increase in the risk for developing debilitating asthma. The introduction of these 4 bacteria in mice induced to suffered asthma shown protection as the mice’s lungs did not present inflammation.

The question is: how bacteria IN the guts can affect your other tissues and organs? One study that was just published shows that these bacteria produce chemicals that may help the immune system to battle against other germs. Without this training, the immune system could fail and create inflammation in the lungs. As a follow up from the latest research it may be possible in the near future to predict asthma, and other diseases, as well as cure some illnesses with gut bacteria.

Be ready to give a shit about your shit.