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From drinking urine to nose picking, there have long been gruesome-sounding 'remedies' with supposed health benefits. But would you go as far as eating a sausage containing bacteria from baby poo? Spanish researchers believe this could be another way to get 'healthy bacteria' in the body.  They say that baby stools are an abundant source of probiotics that boost gut health - and that sausages containing it could become a health food. This is because many types of sausages - including pepperoni and salami - are made with the aid of bacterial fermentation, the website LiveScience reports. The bacteria is either naturally occurring in the raw meat or added to the meat in the manufacturing process. More and more evidence is showing that gut bacteria plays a crucial role in our health. Changes to gut bacteria, that result in an imbalance between 'friendly' and 'unfriendly' bacteria, are associated with cancer, diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. And earlier this year, researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, in California, found that having the right balance of gut bacteria could be the secret to a long life. Probiotics are live bacteria which, when consumed, are thought to colonise the stomach with bugs that help digestion. Their beneficial effects are not wholly proven, although there is increasing evidence they might help with a range of problems, including diarrhoea and food allergies.  This includes research showing that the bacteria in the gut may 'communicate' with the brain, improving mental health and behaviour in conditions such as anxiety, and possibly even autism and Asperger's syndrome. As a result, the probtiocs industry - which revolves largely around yogurt and supplements - is booming. In an attempt to find other ways to incorporate probiotics into diet, Spanish researchers theroised that probiotic bacteria could also be used in fermented sausages. 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'. Probiotics most commonly contain the bacteria Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium - and these are found in high levels in baby poo.  So 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 six months old. They then used bacteria cultured from the stools to make type of fermented sausage called 'fuet', which is similar to chorizo. They also made sausages using commercial probiotic strains of bacteria - but the only sausage with enough 'good' microbes to have any beneficial effect on gut health was that made from the baby poo. Even better, the researchers, who findings are reported in the journal Meat Science, say their creations tasted as a traditional fuet would. 'We ate them, and they tasted very good,' Jofré told LiveScience DailyMail
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