The cleverness and originality of emerging side hustle trends continue to amaze me. I read a couple of months ago that a woman called Ana, annoyed by her boyfriend’s snores, decided to record him during his sleep and upload his night symphony to every platform that she could profit from (think Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, etc). She has not made any updates as of late, but when she uploaded her video explaining what she did, she had monetized 32 dollars. For sounds of snoring. She turned a nuisance into a couple of free coffees. Shakira set up the theme of 2023 by singing “Las mujeres ya no lloran, las mujeres facturan,”1 and oh Lord, Ana was listening.
Allow me to introduce the side hustle that I am paying the most attention to this year.
I cannot turn around anywhere without seeing content about gut health being the key that can unlock unprecedented wellness. Now, probiotics are nothing new to me. During the 90’s, Yakult had genius marketing targeting Mexican moms, convincing them that their kids needed to consume their drink to be healthy. What part of our well-being was Yakult trying to improve? I had no idea. But there I was, drinking this beverage, designed by the brightest Japanese minds, every single day.
I hope I was not the only weirdo doing this, but I just HAD to drink Yakults upside down, tearing some of the package apart in order to open a hole in the tiny bottle. This meant that for every 1000 Lactobacillus casei my body got, I swallowed 561 microplastics.
My friends know I am easily influenced, seeing how after watching gut health documentaries I immediately incorporated pickled onions and kombucha into my diet. My probiotics arrived at the time of writing this story so I will keep you updated. This time I bought kefir, but I still do not know what to do with it.
NEVERTHELESS, there is a limit that I am not crossing (at will) to improve my gut health, and that is a poop transplant.
Poop transplants are not a new thing - we have had visionaries experimenting with this brown matter since the 4th century. According to this article from the American Journal of Gastroenterology, a doctor during the Dong-Jin dynasty prescribed the ingestion of “fecal suspension”, which was a mix of dry, wet, and baby stool, in order to help patients with diarrhea or food poisoning. This medicine would be named yellow soup so patients would not freak out. There is not a success rate that can be shared, but it looks like it worked marvelously for some people.
Human ingenuity in poop reached another high point in the 17th century with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. This Dutch man was an entrepreneur in the textile business and, as part of his craft, he developed lenses to be able to more closely see the quality of fabrics’ threads. Then he ventured to put different things below the lenses, including coffee beans, minerals… and also his blood and his loose stool, because why not!? He discovered that when his fecal matter was looser, it contained a higher quantity of small animals than when it was firmer.
Nowadays, caca transplants have proven successful in treating Clostridium difficile, an infection of the colon that occurs sometimes after the use of antibiotics.
Over 700 patients are reported to have been treated with FMT for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) since Eiseman's experiment.4 Three recent randomized controlled trials have reported cure rates of 90% or higher. - de Groot PF, Frissen MN, de Clercq NC, Nieuwdorp M. Fecal microbiota transplantation in metabolic syndrome: History, present and future.
I read in Slate that there is a guy in the US who created an online marketplace to buy and sell human feces. His target market is people who want to relieve their gastrointestinal symptoms, but cannot get their healthcare providers to cover the process, either because they do not have a formal diagnosis, or because the procedure is still novel and has yet to prove more of its magnificent effects in a more formal way.
So basically how this business works is that if you want to be a donor, you have to answer a questionnaire to assess your general health and they will do a first testing of your excrement to check if there are any potentially dangerous elements to it. This is done in order to assess that you have a gut environment that other people would be jealous of. After that, buyers can go to the website and select the person they want to get their supplies from. As of now, you can earn up to 500 USD per stool sample. One person's trash is another person's do-it-yourself enema.
After a recipient selects a donor and pays, the goods are packaged in dry ice are mailed. Shoutout to delivery people, because you just never know if you are carrying a set of multicolored spatulas or human poop.
My main question while writing this story is whether the diversification of the gut ecosystem is the reason dogs eat poop. Revindication for dogs! They are too ahead of their time.
For people who do not speak Spanish or who do not know use Google, this translates to Women no longer cry, now they get paid 💰.