Feces Have Medicinal Value Too: This Year's Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to Gut-Microbiota Researchers

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Professor Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, for his long and meticulous research on the gut microbiota, which discovered that gut dysbiosis is closely linked to malnutrition, obesity, diabetes, and other diseases. Professor Gordon's findings provide an entirely new view for understanding the subtle relationship between the gut microbiota and human health.

Professor Gordon's research shows that the human gut microbiota is a natural barrier to health, not only helping us digest food but also helping us resist various viruses. The human intestine contains 500 to 1,000 different species of bacteria; bacteria account for over one-tenth of body weight. These bacteria guard our health; once the body loses this microbial army, life is in danger. The gut microbiota can also regulate our emotions; our mood is related to the gut flora.

In fact, the relationship between gut microbiota and human health was noticed by many physicians as early as one or two thousand years ago. The custom—mocked repeatedly by Fang Zhouzi—of TCM having people take urine and stool to treat disease was actually the ancients making use of the body's natural beneficial flora. The 'fecal clear' extracted from stool is indeed an effective drug in TCM clinical practice; its formal name is Jinzhi (Golden Juice).

Jinzhi is made by collecting the stool of healthy children, filtering out food residue with clean water, then sealing the suspension in an earthen jar and burying it in the ground. After several years, it is dug up; after long settling, Jinzhi has become a transparent liquid, used to treat high fever, bodily heat, and epidemics (large-scale acute infectious diseases). What is used here is precisely the beneficial flora of the human gut—the body's natural disease resistance.

On the same principle as Jinzhi is Lunhui Jiu (Samsara Wine), refined from the urine of young boys. By the way, a person's own urine can treat various hard-to-treat cough-and-wheezing conditions with good effect. The method is to collect one's own urine and soak eggs in it, just as one makes salted duck eggs, then boil and eat the eggs; eating them for a period treats chronic cough and wheezing. Human urine can also yield natural hormones; the TCM drug Qiushi (Autumn Stone), prepared from urine, is the earliest artificial hormone invented by humanity. It works well for many diseases.

In recent years, the use of human feces and urine to treat disease has drawn medical attention. For various stubborn ailments caused by hard-to-treat gastrointestinal infections, modern medicine now has a new therapy—fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), in which stool suspension from a healthy donor is infused into the patient's intestine to rebuild the gut flora and treat stubborn chronic digestive-tract diseases. In 1958, an American doctor used fecal solution to save a dying patient with infection—the earliest case recorded in English literature. In recent years, Japanese and Chinese medicine have also repeatedly used FMT to rescue critically ill patients. In Europe and America, healthy people's stool has become a treasure collected by medical institutions, bought for several to dozens of dollars per sample.

In fact, as early as over a thousand years ago, Ge Hong's Zhouhou Beiji Fang (Emergency Formulas to Keep at Hand) in China recorded using fecal clear for food poisoning and severe diarrhea: 'Squeeze the juice of feces, drink several ge to one or two sheng; it is called Huanglong Tang (Yellow Dragon Decoction); the aged is best.' It also recorded treating disease with animal feces, such as 'ass dung: squeeze five or six ge of juice and drink it warm at once; it immediately settles it.' In many TCM classics, formulas for treating 'evil attack' (zhong e) emergency immediately infuse fecal juice as first aid.

The human gut's symbiotic flora mainly includes Bacteroides, Clostridium, Bifidobacterium, and Lactobacillus; today's so-called probiotic supplements basically contain these bacteria. This natural gut-benefiting flora in feces is the guardian of human health. Most patients with chronic gastrointestinal disease suffer from gut dysbiosis.

And the chief culprit causing gut dysbiosis is the abuse of antibiotics; China is the country with the most severe antibiotic abuse. Not only do hospitals abuse antibiotics heavily, but some aquaculture and livestock farmers also add antibiotics to feed when raising fish, chickens, ducks, cattle, and sheep—the common meat animals. So after we eat these foods, the beneficial gut bacteria are killed by the antibiotics in them. Few modern people can truly pass a standard healthy stool; healthy stool is golden-yellow, cylindrical, soft-but-firm. Yet if you observe others' stools in a restroom now, nine in ten are abnormal; that is, nine in ten people have unhealthy stools. The incidence of colorectal cancer in China is also climbing year by year, already ranking third among cancer causes of death.