'Healthy bacteria’ sausages made from... baby poo
Most effective probiotic bacteria is found in our poo, say scientists who collected nappy contents
Spanish scientists have created sausages with bacteria from baby poo and are hailing them as a new health food.
They’ve found an abundance of the healthy bacteria Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium in baby poo.
These natural probiotics boost gut health so they’ve used the live bacteria to ferment sausages.
The chorizo style fermented sausages could be another way to incorporate live bacteria into your diet.
According to the Daily Mail, Live Science contributor Charles Q Choi reports that “for probiotic bacteria to work, they must survive the acids in the digestive tract. As such, the researchers focused on microbes found alive in human faeces”.
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The researchers, led by Anna Jofré, a food microbiologist at Catalonia's Institute of Food and Agricultural Research, in Girona, Spain, took stool samples from the nappies of 43 babies aged up to 6-months-old.
They used bacteria cultured from the stools to make a type of fermented sausage called 'fuet', which is similar to chorizo.
They also made sausages using commercial probiotic strains of bacteria – but they say the only sausage with enough 'good' microbes to have any beneficial effect on gut health was that made from the baby poo.
“We ate them, and they tasted very good,” Jofré told LiveScience.
We think we’ll stick to probiotic yoghurts for now. What do you think?
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