Research

Hormonal

Weekly oral fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) from lean donors does not significantly improve insulin sensitivity, body weight, or body composition in adults with obesity and mild-to-moderate insulin resistance over a 12-week period.

For adults with obesity and mild insulin resistance, receiving weekly oral FMT capsules from lean donors does not significantly improve insulin sensitivity, weight, or body composition over 12 weeks. While the treatment is safe and alters gut bacteria, it should not be expected to replace lifestyle interventions like diet and exercise for metabolic improvement.

GoodRefutesHIGH confidence
There were no statistically significant improvements in insulin sensitivity in the FMT group compared to the placebo group... There were no statistically significant differences between groups for most of the other secondary metabolic outcomes, including HOMA-IR... and body composition... over the 12-week study.
Elaine W Yu et al. · PLoS Medicine · 2020

Why this rating

Double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled pilot trial, though limited by small sample size (n=24) and short duration.

Source

Fecal microbiota transplantation for the improvement of metabolism in obesity: The FMT-TRIM double-blind placebo-controlled pilot trial

Elaine W Yu et al. · PLoS Medicine · 2020

DOI 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003051

rct · n=24Cited 312×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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