Skinny People's Poop May Hold the Disgusting Key to Weight Loss

By Erin Gloria Ryan | September 6, 2013 | 10:20pm

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“Are you obese? Have you tried everything to lose weight (black and white footage of a person accidentally springing a thighmaster into a flatscreen TV. TV falls down on top of person/ footage of person running in sweatbands and wristbands and kneebands and looking miserable/ footage of a heavy person forlornly ordering salad while all of their thin dinner companions order steak sundaes topped with bacon whipped cream and laugh and laugh) Well, aspiring thin person — toil no more. Today, we’re offering you the opportunity to lose weight THE EASY WAY: and all you have to do is have bacteria from the poop of a thin person injected into your intestines!”

So the methodology needs a little work, but the research is still pretty fascinating and important. According to the New York Times, yesterday scientists published the results of a study that found that the bacteria living inside the digestive systems of thin people may actually be keeping them thin — and vice versa.

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The experiment sounds convoluted, but the results are fascinating: scientists extracted stomach bacteria from human twins where one was fat and the other thin. The then took that bacteria and injected it into different groups of mice that were raised in a sterile environment and thus didn’t have any variance in their own stomach bacteria. The mice with the “fat” bacteria actually grew up to have significantly more body fat than those fed the “thin” bacteria, despite being fed identical diets to the mice whose systems contained “thin” bacteria. But wait; there’s more! After the mice were combined into a single cage and began eating each other’s droppings (again, gross), the “thin” bacteria overtook the “fat” bacteria and the fat mice lost weight.

Serious first thought upon hearing this: maybe that’s why everyone in NYC is so skinny. Because we’re all eating each other’s skinny poo bugs; we’re all wallowing in each others’ filth like a tribe of hyper-ambitious rat-people eating strips of wallpaper from our 10X12 foot studio apartments for nourishment.

Researchers say there’s still a lot more poop-injecting ahead of them before they nail down exactly what this means to human obesity, but the results are promising.

Hey, at least stealing the poop of a thin person and injecting it into your own stomach is less dehumanizing than those ab belts that just make your muscles contract on their own. And it’s definitely less humiliating than Strippercize.

[NYTimes]

Image via Algefoto/Shutterstock.