Weight loss methods are becoming more ubiquitous with each passing year and today it is being revealed that researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have begun freeze-drying feces from donors and encapsulating the excrement into pills to be given to obese patients in a new clinical trial. The experiment is being led by clinical researcher Elaine Yu and will involve replacing a human’s intestinal microbes with that of a donor from their waste in hopes that it could aide health problems like obesity and insulin sensitivity.
The pills are odorless, tasteless and double-encapsulated to ensure they will not release until they reach the right location in the large intestine.
Yu also adds that the subjects of the experiment will not be able to tell whether they are ingesting placebos or the poop pills because they are under such heavy regulation from the Food and Drug Administration. The idea for the study came from a 2013 study where mice were given gut microbes from lean and obese humans and the mice that received the lean waste remained slim.
The participants in the trial will be receiving the poop pills every week for for six weeks and their weight and overall health will be documented every three months, all while maintaining their regular eating habits.
Yu does admit that she is not sure what the results will yield.
We don’t know what the results of this trial will be,” Yu told the News. “I don’t want to feed any frenzy of people jumping on this bandwagon. DIY experiments make me very nervous, as a physician and as a researcher.
