Make yoghurt from poo?

Factual Questions
1

Or some other food that relies on bacteria to transform it?

If do a survey of 1000 people with healthy digestive systems and find out which bacteria are most common in their poo and gut. I then isolate the 5 (or some other suitable number) most common bacteria, culture them, and add them to some food stuff to produce a product designed to recolonise your digestive system with good bacteria. For example, after a course of antibiotics you might need a refresh.

Is this a good idea? Can you make something similar to yoghurt this way? Is this what Yakult is?

2

Basically, no - the conditions are too different, and the stomach is a barrier to the transit of live bacteria (the European Food Safety Authority has rejected claims for probiotics due to a lack of evidence). There arebacterial recolonisation treatments (sometime used to treat c. difficile infections of the gut), but these just use fecal material from a healthy donor, directly passed into the lower gut (enema or nasogastric tube). New procedures do involve the encapsulation of bacteria in enteric-coated capsules that can pass the stomach before delivery.

3

People just say things without evidence.

Of course the lack of evidence refers to full story - which includes the ability of good bacteria to displace bad bacteria, and that its needed.

Eg the good bacteria won’t thrive just because they are the good bacteria.
Eg what is bad bacteria anyway ?

Eg You know, the theory of antibiotics is partly that the bad bacteria are weakened so that the immune system can kill them off.
So lets look at real evidence.
Your stomach is not a bacteria killer, It does keep bacteria levels LOW,
if you eat a tough food, eg a raw animal cartilage, it may be kept in the stomach for a while… so the acid keeps the bacteria in it low…
But what if you drink dirty water ? You get diarrhoea ! straight away. the bacteria got through !. I think that bacteria can easily pass through the stomach, if you drink a lot of water, then the water 1. diluates the acid, ,2. goes through straight away. Evidenced based thought…as required.

Onto Yoghurt.

Yoghurt is made by a acid producing (loving) bacteria that consumes lactose, and makes lactic acid… The acid curds the milk protein to make it yoghurt texture.
It won’t be yoghurt without lactose acid producing bacteria.

BUT, acid producing bacteria is bad bacteria… Lactose-intolerance ? lactose gets through to the large intestine, feeds acid producing bacteria, the acid then irritates the lining…

Our ‘allergy’ to our own poo is merely taste,smell and fear of disease. There is no poison in it ! (or else it would poison you !! if it was ok to be supplying nutrition to your colon 5 minutes ago, it still is when it comes out.

So there is no actual poison in it…Even if the person had botulism in their gut, the toxin kill the person before their poo was itself toxic. It would spread the disease causing bacteria… but that can’t hurt the person who already has the disease…

Lots of food is fermented with gut flora. It tends to be the flora that lives on the food, eg the flora that lives on caggage leaf normally makes sauerkraut.
So yes you could make a bacteria filled pro-biotic drink, just like you make saurkraut or vodka or yoghurt.

4

The specific query in the OP was - could you use lower gut bacteria to ferment a food to act as a probiotic recoloniser. You can use bacteria to ferment food - obviously - and with a wide range of different bacteria (for different foods and results). But the conditions found in food fermentation are quite different from those in the intestines, so the bacteria that live there will not work to ferment food in any useful manner, and will probably be harmful. As far as I can tell, there is no food that you colonise with faecal material to initiate fermentation (and I wouldn’t eat it even if there was).

It is also a fact that gut flora is not consistent through the whole intestinal tract. This is why lower gut bacteria can cause illness when consumed (even by the producer of such bacteria) - the upper gut is a different place, with different conditions, flora and susceptibility. In the same way, the bacteria in your mouth (say, including Staphylococcus aureus) is generally fine there, but it can cause a variety of infections in a number of different areas of the body when it gets there or the immune system is compromised.

And yes, some bacteria do pass the stomach to colonise lower down - for example, cholera. But most bacteria are stopped there, and the scientific consensus from research is that only small levels of bacteria can pass the stomach (but some are just highly infectious), and to recolonise the gut you need to bypass the stomach with a tube/coated pill or approach from the other direction.

[QUOTE=Isilder]
Lots of food is fermented with gut flora. It tends to be the flora that lives on the food, eg the flora that lives on caggage leaf normally makes sauerkraut.
[/QUOTE]
Did you even read this? If it lives on a cabbage leaf - it isn’t gut bacteria. If it is human (or even animal) gut bacteria on a leaf, it is contamination and will probably cause illness (either via bacterial or viral infection, or through toxins produced by the bacteria).

5

it’s poogurt with chunks on the bottom.

you can repopulate yourself buttwise.