Could Ingesting Baby Feces Help Fight COVID-19? Here’s What Science Says

As the nation battles COVID-19, people are looking for anything they can do to prevent themselves from contracting it. Moms fight with their essential oils, doctors with their antibiotics and other pharmaceutical grade medicines, and many people are looking for something stronger than Vitamin C to boost their immune system. There may be an answer laying not far from you, especially if you have a newborn.

Professor Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at King's College in London says your body's microbiome and gut health play a vital role in your body's immune response to not only infections, but also a role in preventing damage to your lungs and other vital organs.

Spector also says that what you eat has the biggest impact on the microbes in your stomach, much more than supplements that claim to "boost your immune system" with little to no evidence to back them up. Probiotics are a great way to give your microbiome a jumpstart.

“Microbiome diversity declines as you get older, which may help to explain some of the age-related changes we see in immune responses, so it’s even more necessary to maintain a healthy microbiome throughout life.”

When it comes to microbiomes, you may think of the Season 23 episode of South Park when Sheila Is sick and has a "Fecal Transplant", and everyone is after Tom Brady's fecal "spice" to have an unstoppable microbiome. Believe it or not, there's more truth to the health benefits of healthy feces than you'd think.

The Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center performed a research project in 2018, studying the health benefits of infant feces.

Probiotics seem to be everywhere these days -- in yogurt, pickles, bread, even dog food. But there's one place that may surprise you: There are probiotics in dirty diapers.

Short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), which are a key factor in your gut's health, decrease as you age. Those who battle with diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders, and cancer have significantly less short-chain fatty acids. The more you have, the better your microbiome.

In their study, Hariom Yadav, assistant professor of molecular medicine at Wake Forest, and his team collected fecal samples form 34 dirty diapers of healthy infants.

According to Yadav, "Babies are usually pretty healthy and clearly do not suffer from age-related diseases, such as diabetes and cancer."

Through a long process, they ended up selecting the 10 "best" samples of the 321 samples they analyzed.

Because there was a shortage of people willing to try out the experiments, the studiers gave rats a dose of the SCFA "cocktail." They also injected the samples into a "human feces medium."

The results were exactly as they'd hoped; the probiotics enhanced the production of SCFAs in the rats' guts, and in the human feces sample.

I'm not telling you eating baby crap is going to help, that's up for you to decide.