There May Be A Good Reason To Store Your Poop For Future Use – Health Digest

According to a 2022 opinion piece published in Trends in Molecular Medicine, another good reason to store your poop for future use includes autologous fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). The concept of fecal transplants — collecting poop from a healthy donor and introducing it into a patient’s GI tract via colonoscopy — is not a new one. It’s also called heterologous FMT. It’s currently done to treat severe bacterial infections in the digestive tract, like Clostridioides difficile, also known as C. diff. The idea is that the microbiome from a healthy gut can somehow bring balance to the gut microbiome in someone who’s ill. 

Autologous — sample obtained from a person and given to the same person — FMT can be revolutionary when it comes to fighting IBD, asthma, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and aging, according to the researchers who wrote the paper. You collect samples of your feces when you’re young and healthy to be stored for your own use when you’re older. Your gut microbiome goes through a lot of different changes in your lifetime based on what you eat and some medications like antibiotics that you may consume. By preserving your poop, as you would with eggs or blood, you’re giving your future self options to treat disease, per the scientists. 

“For example, in the case of aging, we expect that autologous FMT may be a more powerful therapeutic approach to promote healthy aging of the host than heterologous FMT,” shared senior author of the study and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School Yang-Yu Liu (via NBC News).