NUTRITION: Can poop help you lose weight?

I thought I’d seen it all: from the cabbage soup diet and Atkins, to juice fasts and stomach stapling. And then I saw this: an article where subjects are voluntarily ingesting freeze-dried poop in a bid to lose

weight. Now I really have seen it all!

Before I dismiss the trial due to its disgusting nature, let me tell you a little about it. It starts this year and involves 20 obese patients who are going to test a theory that gut bacteria can influence weight. In order

to do that, they will be ingesting capsules containing freeze-dried stool (from healthy individuals).

So why would this actually work? Well, the work on mice (the things we do to these poor little guys!) showed that the mice that received gut microbes from an obese twin became overweight (whereas those

that got bacteria from the lean twin stayed trim).

In humans, faecal transplants have been used to treat certain intestinal infections. In one particular case, a woman received a faecal transplant from her healthy-but-overweight daughter. While the woman’s

infection cleared up, she began to gain weight.

Whether the freeze-dried poop capsules are effective remains to be seen, but it does make me wonder the lengths that we are willing to go just so that we can have our cake and eat it.

In my experience, the best thing to do if you can’t bear to go on a diet, but are desperate to shed the pounds (and get your cholesterol and/or blood sugar down) is to go on the 5:2 diet.

Yes, it’s a diet, but it is much easier than actually going on a ‘real’ diet. All that it involves is eating less two days a week. What I tell my patients to do is, on two days of their choosing, to skip breakfast, eat

lunch at around midday and eat a piece of fruit for dinner. That’s it.

Eating in this way brings that calorie intake for those two days right down, but your body is still burning  fat as if it were getting the normal amount of food that you eat – and this is how weight loss is achieved.

Have a look online to see the other health benefits associated with the diet. Remember, you are only dieting twice a week, not more. If you start to restrict your food intake on the other days, you will not lose

weight with this new way of eating.

The other thing to bear in mind is that if you were to get healthier in general, the diet would be even more effective. However, it’s not a prerequisite.