Fecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT) is a procedure that transfers the stool of healthy people to the guts of unhealthy people. The mechanism is to replace a dysbiotic gut microbiome with a healthier, disease-resistant, more youthful gut microbiome. Think of FMTs as a kind of super probiotic to optimize your gut health!
Since the microbiome affects almost all aspects of human health, functioning, and development, FMTs are a promising treatment for a huge variety of health conditions, including Multiple Sclerosis, ALS, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Autism, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Long Covid, and many more. FMTs from young donors might even have anti-aging effects!
FMTs can easily and safely be done at home DIY without a doctor - both for the donor and recipient.
FMT treatment could help a huge amount of people, but is severely bottlenecked by a lack of proper donors. Donors must not only be free of various diseases & pathogens, but also exceptionally healthy, and with excellent microbiomes - something that's alarmingly rare these days.
Babies can already be FMT donors at a few months of age, and the younger the donor, the better usually. And babies actually have a much higher chance of being good FMT donors - especially if the mothers take extra steps to ensure the baby has a great microbiome.
More specifically, if the following steps are taken by the mother, there is a very high chance that the young baby will be a great FMT donor and can thus fill the FMT donor bottleneck:
6 to 12 months before birth, the pregnant mother needs to start taking care of her microbiome (probiotics, lifestyle, diet, etc.) to ensure it's as good as possible at the beginning of the child's life and later on. Also, ideally the mother already starts with a pretty good microbiome & general health. That's because the mother's (and to a lesser degree the father's) microbiome has a huge influence on the child's microbiome - for better or worse!
Once the baby is born, the parents need to take several measures for the baby to set them up for a great microbiome & general health. This involves probiotics, lifestyle and diet interventions, exposure to many microbes, and a few other things, but nothing too crazy.
Making babies available as FMT donors, and taking the extra steps to make sure they end up actually being good donors, is a huge win for everyone involved:
Benefits for the child. Since the microbiome is very stable over time, getting your child's microbiome right straight from the very beginning perfectly sets them up for a great microbiome for the rest of their life - along with all the accompanying benefits for health, development, and functioning.
Benefits for people in need of FMTs. With your child being a great FMT donor, you can use its stool to improve your own and other’s microbiome, and thus health, and cure their gut-borne diseases. And while your new-born is still using diapers, collecting stools is way easier than otherwise.
Parents can make a lot of profit by selling their child's stool for FMTs. There are a few FMT companies that will happily buy all of your child's stools every day for 20-100$/stool - which makes up to 36000$/year for very little effort! One company even pays 500$ for stools from exceptionally healthy donors.
It's good for the parents' health. Improving your (the parent's) health & microbiome is one of the key steps you need to take to ensure your child ends up being a good donor. And obviously, doing so is good for you!
Other benefits. See below.
One of my key motivations for this post is that I'm looking for FMT donors for myself to treat my severe chronic health issues.
I'm hoping that this post motivates a few parents to take care of their child's microbiome and make them available as FMT donor for me and others.
I'm also interested in founding a FMT startup connecting good FMT donors with people in need of FMTs.
My offer to soon-to-be parents is:
If your microbiome & general health is already decently good from the start,
and if you are willing to take the various steps to improve your and your baby's microbiome,
then I will help you as much as I can with everything involved to make sure your child ends up being a good donor,
and I will pre-commit to buying at least 300 stools from your baby for 20$ each in the first 2 years of its life - assuming the likely case that the baby actually ends up being a good donor.
How to perform FMTs at home without a doctor
FMTs can easily & safely be done at home, both for the stool donor and the recipient. Here's roughly how:
Find a good donor that is exceptionally healthy with a great microbiome, and screen them thoroughly for various diseases and pathogens.
Once you have a donor, they need to put their fresh stools in a vacuum zipper bag, remove the air (oxygen kills most good bacteria in stool), and store them in a freezer.
The FMT recipient picks up the frozen stools, or dry-ice shipping is used for delivery.
The recipient either fills the stools into capsules for oral use, and/or prepares enemas with stools for rectal use.
Just one FMT from one stool is already great, but for many health conditions multiple FMTs from many stools over several weeks and months are needed.
Reasons to get FMTs
Treatment for a very wide range of chronic and acute health conditions, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's' disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, Autism, and many more, as well as of course most gut health issues and allergies
FMTs as a biohacking tool to improve your gut health and thus your mood, energy, sleep, cognitive functioning, immune system, skin, etc. A healthy gut microbiome has been shown to positively impact and regulate virtually every aspect of human health, development, and function.
Anti-aging: The gut microbiome declines with age, contributing to inflamaging and all sorts of other problems. Keeping the microbiome young and healthy is therefore well worth it. And by far the best way to do so are FMTs from young donors. See my blog post (DIY) FMT for Anti-Aging & Biohacking.
Restoring your microbiome after antibiotics. Antibiotics wreak havoc on your microbiome, causing long lasting and likely even irreversible damage by causing dysbiosis and sometimes fully eradicating some strains. Current available options to prevent that are likely inadequate, but FMTs are probably the best thing you can do.
Why FMTs are a great opportunity for (soon-to-be) parents
The big bottleneck for FMTs is finding young and healthy donors. Only extremely few people in the western world have a good enough microbiome and excellent general health to qualify as a good donor. Healthy stool is very rare and thus precious!
But for reasons explained below, young infants have a much higher chance of being good donors, especially if parents planned for this from the start and took active measures to improve the newborn’s gut health.
Also, children can already be FMT donors at the age of just a few months. There is no known age-limit.
Therefore, there is a great opportunity for soon-to-be-parents to fill the FMT donor bottleneck with their newborn children.
The many advantages of making your child a FMT donor
For parents to take extra steps for their child to become a good FMT donor is actually a triple-win situation: The parents, child, and FMT receivers all can greatly benefit:
Benefits for the child. Since the microbiome is very stable over time, getting your child's microbiome right straight from the very beginning perfectly sets the stage for a great microbiome for the rest of its life - along with all the benefits for health, development, and functioning. And on the other hand, once a microbiome is out of balance, it is very hard to fix it, which sets up your child for a much higher chance of various diseases later in life. Even if you don’t care about FMT at all, you might want to double down on your child’s gut health for this reason alone.
Benefits for people in need of FMTs. That’s the main point of this post. With your child being a great FMT donor, you can use its stool to improve your own and other’s microbiome, and thus health. And while your new-born is still using diapers, collecting stools is way easier than otherwise.
Parents can make a lot of profit by selling their child's stool for FMTs. The FMT company Human Microbes pays $500 per stool from a very high-quality donor. See my other post: Being a donor for Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT): Do good & earn easy money (up to 180k/y)! Human Microbes has extremely high standards, but selling all of your child's stools every day for 20-100$ is totally realistic. That'd be 36000$/year for very little effort!
It's good for the parents' health. One of the most important ways to improve your child's microbiome (see below) is actually to improve your own microbiome, since the mother's (and to a smaller degree the father's) microbiome strongly influences the child's microbiome - for better or worse! And since we share a lot of our microbiomes with the people closest to us, a healthy child's microbiome also benefits the parents.
At least preserve the option for later. Even if you (the parent) have no current interest in FMTs for yourself or others, it's wise to at least preserve this option for later, given that it’s great for your child anyway. One day you might become sick with some gut-borne disease, or you need to take antibiotics which totally mess up your microbiome. Having your child as a good source for FMTs available then could prove to be very handy. And not least you might want stools from your much younger child for its anti-aging benefits when you get older. See here.
Why do infants have an especially high chance of being good FMT donors?
With infants, you can do everything right from the start. You can literally end up with a person that has never eaten unhealthy junk food; never done anything harmful for the microbiome - like having to take antibiotics; and always eaten a perfect diet (breast milk, and healthy food later on). Infants start with a blank state. Their intestines are literally sterile at birth! Much easier to build up a perfect microbiome from scratch rather than having to fix an existing one.
With infants, there has been less time, i.e. a lower chance, for microbiome-detrimental events to occur.
Lower chance of having already been infected by any parasites and other pathogens that often stay for life and would exclude someone as donors. Asymptomatic parasite infections, e.g. by B. Hominis are very common even in the western world, and not easy to get rid of.
Lower chance of having had to take antibiotics.
Many harmful things that usually set one up to not be a good donor can be avoided in an infant by the parent. This includes:
Deciding against a c-section birth (or at least do a "vaginal swap" if they really don't want to a natural birth)
Not breastfeeding for long enough, ideally for as long as possible.
Growing up in a too sterile environment with very little microbe exposure.
The microbiome gets worse as we age, hence you generally want your FMT donor to be as young as possible, which makes infants an obvious choice.
However, infants don’t fully start as a blank state. That’s because one of the most important determinants for an infant's gut health is the mother’s gut health (and to a lesser degree, the father's).
That’s why this post is mostly/especially relevant for relatively young healthy mothers with an already fairly good microbiome themselves.
This is also why the title of this post says soon-to-be parents. Ideally, the becoming parents, especially the mother, start to improve their own microbiome at least 6 months (better 12) prior to birth through various lifestyle, diet, and other interventions as part of her prepare-for-the-baby regimen. This ideally includes doing FMT from a good donor themselves.
And again, as a mother you’d want to do that for your child anyway, regardless of any FMT considerations.
How to improve an infant’s microbiome?
By far the most important determinant for a child’s microbiome is the one of the mother. Focusing on the mother’s microbiome is therefore key.
The father’s (and other household members, e.g. siblings) microbiome also has a significant impact and focusing on his gut health as well is also a great idea.
Improving gut health is not easy and most ordinary interventions only take you so far. FMT is the most powerful (and in many cases the only truly working) gut health intervention. That’s why it might be a good idea for the mother to get FMT from a high quality donor herself prior to conception. Buy/get high quality stools once in order to get much more later! I’ve personally bought stools from Human Microbes and can recommend them.
Consider not doing a c-section. A newborn needs to be covered in the mother’s microbes and that doesn’t happen during c-section. Also, try to avoid antibiotics as much as you can, also as a parent. As a parent you really don’t want to mess up your microbiome just as you are passing it on to your child!
Breastfeeding for as long as possible is another important intervention.
Of course, various lifestyle and other interventions are also highly recommended, both for the mother and the child. Eat whole foods, exercise; avoid environmental pollutants, including microplastics, aggressive dish washers, emulsifiers in food; sleep well, live a healthy lifestyle, avoid antibiotics, when possible, avoid sugary stuff and junk food, etc.
Some probiotics for the baby and mother may make sense, e.g. evivo's B. Infantis.
Setting the microbiome in early childhood: a crucial period : "Dr. Elinav describes how an over-sterilized environment and exposure to antibiotics in early life may harm the microbiome. He further discusses the eye-opening connection between early childhood germ exposure and a reduced likelihood of allergies and autoimmune diseases. Thus parents can steward the configuration of their child's microbiome, potentially reducing the risk of asthma, obesity, and other diseases in later life. In this clip, Dr. Eran Elinav discusses the importance of the early childhood period in shaping a healthy microbiome."
"“Like mother, like daughter.” The phrase is often invoked to describe how children resemble their parents. While we know that human genes are passed from generation to generation, an expanding body of research now shows that many microbiome populations are also inherited. The microbes a child inherits are acquired from both parents and even siblings. However, microbial populations inherited from the mother have a particularly strong impact on a child’s development and health."
"The impact of inherited microbes cannot be underestimated."
"While the vaginal microbiome has received a great deal of attention from the research community, recent research also indicates that microbes persist in the womb, where they come in contact with a fetus before it is born."
"Dysregulation of this placental microbiome by pathogens has also been associated with preterm birth and low infant birth weight."
"After birth, an infant’s health is further shaped by microbes it continually acquires from its mother’s breast milk. While just a few years ago breast milk was believed to be sterile, it is now understood to deliver a robust microbiome that varies among women. An enteric-breast circulation allows microbes from a mother’s gut to reach her mammary glands and vice versa via the blood. The intensity of this circulatory pathway appears to increase during the end stages of pregnancy and during breastfeeding. Microbes originating in a mother’s intestines may subsequently be present in her breast milk. These microbes may in turn play a large role in forming her infant’s early gut communities."
Reviews on establishment and impact of gut microbiome on development & later health: [2019][2018][2018][2018][2017][2016][2018]
Newborn Gut Bacteria Differs If Infants Breastfed Or Formula-Fed, Vaginal Or Cesarean Birthed [1][2].
antibiotics given to the mother during pregnancy/breastfeeding significantly impact the baby's microbiome [1][2][3][4][5].
Association of the Infant Gut Microbiome With Early Childhood Neurodevelopmental Outcomes (Mar 2019) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2728623 "These epidemiologic findings appear to support the hypothesis that early life gut microbiota are associated with neurodevelopmental outcomes in childhood"
I'm always looking for new FMT donors. In my case to treat my CFS. I also know lots of ppl looking for FMT donors. Please pm me if you think you are a good donor or if you are a (soon-to-be) parent up for this. I'm happy to pay or do whatever.
Executive summary
How to perform FMTs at home without a doctor
Reasons to get FMTs
Why FMTs are a great opportunity for (soon-to-be) parents
The many advantages of making your child a FMT donor
For parents to take extra steps for their child to become a good FMT donor is actually a triple-win situation: The parents, child, and FMT receivers all can greatly benefit:
Why do infants have an especially high chance of being good FMT donors?
How to improve an infant’s microbiome?
sources, science, further links to learn more:
Help me!
I'm always looking for new FMT donors. In my case to treat my CFS. I also know lots of ppl looking for FMT donors. Please pm me if you think you are a good donor or if you are a (soon-to-be) parent up for this. I'm happy to pay or do whatever.