A New Study Supports the Idea That Some People Are “Super Poopers.” You Could Be One of Them.

All the more reason to donate your stools—for science!

"Super poopers" are the heroes living among us.Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

There’s nothing charming about poop. And most people, I assume, don’t want to spend any time beyond what’s necessary thinking—let alone talking—about defecation. But here’s the deal: Poop saves lives. Through fecal transplants (which are exactly what they sound like), patients with ailments like C. difficile infection, inflammatory bowel disease, or diabetes can, in many cases, cure or treat their condition with a fresh set of gut bacteria. And now, a new study bolsters the theory that some people may be “super poopers,” or fecal donors whose gut bacteria transplants are more successful in treating disease than the average donor.

“[Super donors] have been observed in a lot of different studies for different disorders,” says Justin O’Sullivan, an associate professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and an author on the new study, published Monday in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. “And what people have observed is that there’s a propensity for some individuals to have microbiomes which make a greater impact on the clinical features and the characteristics of the recipients.”

In some cases, according to O’Sullivan, super-donor transplants have achieved clinical remission rates of about double the average.

O’Sullivan and his team did their research by analyzing more than 100 fecal transplant trials, conducted mostly in the past decade, and found evidence not only that super donors exist, but also data that could explain why. In many trials, a small percentage of donors gave stool samples that outperformed the others; those donors commonly had a high diversity of gut microbiota, which ultimately “appears to best predict” a patient’s response to a fecal matter transplant, the authors conclude. In other words, the more microbes your feces bring to the table, the more equipped it may be to treat disease.

The results are particularly significant for the future of medicine, because identifying the phenomenon of “super donors” is the first of many steps in eventually understanding how human gut microbiology can influence chronic diseases—Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease, among others—that are related to, or affect, gut bacteria. Before you can treat a disease, says O’Sullivan, you need to understand how it works.

“If we can understand what makes the feces from one person ‘super feces,'” says O’Sullivan, “then we can start to isolate new organisms that are within [their feces] so that we can move what was a really crude bacteria therapy into a more precision-medicine type approach, where we’re using specific organisms to treat specific disorders.”

While the new study suggests that microbe diversity plays a role in making super donors “super,” more controlled trials are needed. “The lack of large randomized controlled clinical trials of [Fecal Microbiota Transplantation] for the treatment of chronic diseases,” the authors write, “has meant that many observations, such as the existence of FMT super-donors, are not yet robustly supported by empirical evidence.”

The field of fecal matter science is still in its infancy, so the super-donor theory—which was first proposed only in recent years—still needs more data to back it up, even with the new study. But perhaps the more significant challenge toward applying this theory in medicine is that researchers wouldn’t know who among us is truly “super” because doctors don’t screen for, or generally keep records on, their patients’ gut microbiomes.

Donating your feces to a local hospital or nonprofit could be one way to help—and it could be lucrative. One Boston-based nonprofit, OpenBiome, pays $40 per stool donation. (But before you whip out a plastic baggie and mail your poop in, you should know that OpenBiome only works with donors in the Boston area and, due to an abundance of safety precaution, typically accepts less than 3 percent of applicants, making the screening process more selective than getting into Harvard.)

The group works with more than 1,000 hospitals across the country and has sent treatments to about 40,000 patients, mostly with C. difficile.

According to Majdi Osman, the clinical program director at OpenBiome, the super-donor phenomenon is something OpenBiome is aware of, but hasn’t tracked directly. “I think this is a really interesting paper, and it frames this very important question for all of us in this field,” he says about the Frontiers study. “I think it’s too early to claim that there’s a super donor for one particular disease, but we’re very interested in exploring that question further.”

After all, there’s a lot to learn from poop—even if it’s uncomfortable to talk about. “It’s an amazing thing when you think about it, right?” asks O’Sullivan. “Considering that we can transfer very carefully screened fecal material from one healthy individual into somebody else—we can do that. We can change the microbes that live in the recipient without making that person sick. In fact, we can help make them better.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate