Can i eat my poo?
Executive summary
No — deliberately eating feces is unsafe and medically inadvisable; while a tiny accidental taste often causes no lasting harm, feces routinely contain bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can produce diarrhea, fever, or more serious infections and therefore should not be consumed [1] [2] [3].
1. Why the question matters: pathogens hiding in plain sight
Human and animal feces are a biologically active mixture of undigested food, gut bacteria, cells from intestinal linings and potentially transmissible organisms; documented pathogens include E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, norovirus, hepatitis A, Giardia and Cryptosporidium, which have all been cited as risks from fecal exposure [1] [3].
2. How dangerous is “a little” — the medical reality
Public health and poison-control guidance treats small, accidental ingestions as often “minimally toxic” if the person remains asymptomatic, advising hydration and watchful waiting but immediate contact with medical help if vomiting, diarrhea, fever or lethargy develop — yet that pragmatic stance is not an endorsement to experiment with intentional ingestion because unpredictable pathogens and individual vulnerabilities change the risk profile [1] [2].
3. Intentional ingestion: no protective myth of safety
Sexual practices or fetish contexts sometimes involve fecal contact, and harm-reduction advice for non-ingestion (gloves, dental dams, washing) exists precisely because consuming feces markedly raises infection risk; reputable sexual-health counseling explicitly warns that eating someone’s feces — or one’s own — “greatly increases” chances of disease transmission [4].
4. When eating feces signals illness, not curiosity
In clinical literature, coprophagia (compulsive feces eating) appears as a symptom linked to neurological or psychiatric disorders — seizures, dementia, schizophrenia and developmental disabilities are repeatedly documented contexts where feces-eating is pathological rather than recreational — and clinicians treat the behavior as a health threat requiring psychiatric and medical interventions [5] [6] [7].
5. Animal and therapeutic exceptions that can be misleading
Some animals practice feces-eating (coprophagy or cecotrophy) for gut flora transfer or nutrient recovery, and modern medicine uses carefully screened fecal microbiota transplants to treat specific infections — but both are context-specific: animal coprophagy is species-normalized behavior and transplants are performed only after rigorous donor screening and by trained clinicians, so neither justifies casual human ingestion [8] [3] [1].
6. Practical advice distilled from the evidence
Treat accidental small exposures pragmatically — clean hands, give water, watch for symptoms and call poison control or a physician if problems appear — but treat intentional ingestion as an avoidable risk: it increases the chance of bacterial, viral and parasitic infections and may reflect or cause underlying psychiatric or medical problems that need professional care [1] [2] [9] [7].
7. Competing perspectives and limits of reporting
Sources converge on the medical risk yet differ in emphasis: poison-control centers and pediatric advice stress that tiny accidental ingestions are often harmless in healthy children [1] [2], while sexual-health guidance and psychiatric literature emphasize infection risk and behavioral pathology [4] [6]. This review is limited to the provided reporting and does not assess every possible pathogen, nor does it substitute for individualized medical advice; clinicians or poison centers should be consulted for specific incidents [1] [2].