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Asked by aedelman to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 19 Mar 2012.
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James Boone answered on 19 Mar 2012:
Hmm, it’s not recommended. Human poo contains a lot of bacteria which can cause severe poisoning. A biologist would be better equipped to answer this but I think the ebola virus is a particularly nasty virus that can come about from faecal matter. The bottom line is yes, it can kill you, but it’s not guaranteed.
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Robert Thompson answered on 19 Mar 2012:
I’m not taking part in that experiment.. Yuck!!! (I also have no idea sorry, not my type of science)
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Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 19 Mar 2012:
You’ll probably throw up a lot first. Yes, it is poisonous but I don’t think it would kill you, just make you really really sick.
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Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 20 Mar 2012:
In most cases I’d say no, provided it comes from someone completely healthy, but it wouldn’t do you any favours. There are a lot of bacteria in poo but most are fairly harmless. The thing is that poo is all the stuff your body wants to get rid of condensed into a small amount of matter. This is also why it smells so bad. Your body has evolved to make potentially harmful things small and taste bad to stop you eating them. It works pretty hard getting rid of all that stuff so why would you want to put it back in. There would also be relatively little nutritional benefit as the vast majority of the “good stuff” has already been taken out.
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Suzanne McEndoo answered on 21 Mar 2012:
It feels a bit redundant, but I will be the fifth person to say “Don’t eat poo” 😛
Some diseases such as polio can be spread through eating poo. Luckily, we don’t (in our part of the world anyway) have to worry about polio thanks to vaccines, but I still wouldn’t advise poo consumption.
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