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Bacchus1976 t1_j5gf4ey wrote

Reply to comment by call-my-name in How our microbiome is shaped by family, friends, and even neighbors. Study of the gut and mouth microbiomes of thousands of people from around the world raises the possibility that diseases linked to microbiome dysfunction, including cancer, diabetes, and obesity, could be partly transmissible. by MistWeaver80

Women sometimes poop a bit when giving birth. Even those that don’t have residual fecal (gut) bacteria on and around their crotch.

A theory is that small amounts of the moms gut bacteria transfer to the baby during natural birth. This seeds their system with moms gut biome.

Cesarean births are sterile and don’t come into contact with the moms crotch and thus are getting their gut bacteria from elsewhere.

Edit: as the pedants below have stated, the OPs focus on poop is mostly for comic effect. There’s a lot of bacteria in and around the vagina that gets transferred to the baby during vaginal birth. Don’t go smearing poop on your newborn.

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peer-reviewed-myopia t1_j5gp04y wrote

I believe this is related to the baby not coming into contact with the vaginal microbiome. It's not related to poop.

Edit: I laughed at OPs comment. Yours was simply unfunny, irrelevant misinformation. Everyone is a pedant when you're a moron.

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Bacchus1976 t1_j5gqxw5 wrote

You believe wrong.

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peer-reviewed-myopia t1_j5grscc wrote

>It appears that any contact between the unborn fetus and the mothers’ vaginal microbiome (for example, through rupture of membranes in labor) results in early microbial seeding and potential long-term health benefits for the newborn. In a study of 18 maternal/newborn dyads, the microbiome of mothers and babies in three groups were compared: newborns born vaginally, newborns born via cesarean with standard post-op treatment, and newborns born via cesarean who were exposed to maternal vaginal fluids immediately following birth Dominguez-Bello et al., 2016. Within two minutes of birth, newborns in the last group had their mouth, face, and body swabbed with a gauze pad that had been incubated for an hour in their mothers’ vagina. These gut, oral, and skin microbiome of these newborns were more similar to vaginally-born newborns than to other newborns who experienced the standard cesarean birth. This similarity persisted through one month of life, when the study ended. These findings are consistent with population-based studies showing that children born via elective cesarean birth (no labor) are at higher risk for health problems like asthma compared to children who had some exposure to their mother’s vaginal microbiome during labor, even if labor ended in cesarean Kristensen & Henriksen, 2016.

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call-my-name t1_j5gt1hf wrote

Every baby that isn’t born via c-section goes through the vaginal canal, not every birthing mother poops or has a baby that comes into contact with her poop.

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Bacchus1976 t1_j5gtkk2 wrote

There is constant transfer of bacteria from gut to vagina. These systems are completely linked.

The person I was responding to brought up poop as a joke. Poop indirectly plays a role in all vaginal births.

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call-my-name t1_j5gulka wrote

““Every generation of mothers hands over its microbiome to the next, as the baby is coated with beneficial germs while being squeezed through the birth canal – but this doesn’t happen for babies born through C-section,” said co-author Martin Blaser, director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers.” Link. It’s not a poop/poop residue adjacent crotch that provides the bacteria, it’s the vaginal bacteria. There’s a reason they tell women to wipe from front to back.

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Bacchus1976 t1_j5gv1of wrote

Are you claiming that there is no gut bacteria in the vagina?

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call-my-name t1_j5gw9iu wrote

No, I’m not claiming that. There is gut bacteria in poop. There is gut bacteria in the vagina. That does not mean they are interchangeable. The exposure received in the vaginal canal is what’s beneficial for the baby.

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NessusANDChmeee t1_j5hk57p wrote

Don’t smear poop on your babies but if you know you’re having a C-section and you want to, you can ask if they do the thing where they transfer your germs to them specifically for this reason.

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Salatios t1_j5j1av6 wrote

In Germany, that's actually standard practice. :)

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NessusANDChmeee t1_j5j1hgw wrote

That’s great to hear! Love it when we use the scientific knowledge we do have to the best of our abilities.

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ChannelCat t1_j5hjgtm wrote

Have they tried smearing poop on the babies though?

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daisyluu09 t1_j5guz8g wrote

Thanks for this explanation! I don’t have children (yet) and was kind of confused. Makes a lot of sense!

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Bacchus1976 t1_j5gv8su wrote

As others have noted it’s a more complex system than just “poop” but this explains the joke.

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Emotional-Profit-202 t1_j5gv5co wrote

Something wrong with this. First of all women doesn’t usually poop a bit when giving birth. This is not as common as described. That can happen in different amounts, but in modern days different procedures and medication are used to prevent it from happening as most of the births take place under some form of medical care. More often than ever the exterior parts are sterilised several times during birth. Significant part of microbiology should have been passed to the child from vaginal microbiome.

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Prionnebulae t1_j5hh0dh wrote

I still have olfactory nightmares about the poop that came out of my wife during child birth. Every time some would drizzle out the nurse would put a rag on top of it until the stack got too high then start over.

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Verotten t1_j5ivar9 wrote

Birthing suite staff truly are in a league of their own. I have a lot of respect for those midwives, OBGYNs and nurses.

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