Who would have thought?
Scientists have found a new way to determine whether or not a child will excel in intelligence later in life when they are just one years of age. It's a fairly unpleasant experiment involving the child's poo.
Yes, that's right - your child's intelligence can be proved by looking in their nappy.
According to
The Mirror, study from UNC School of Medicine, which was led by Rebecca Knickmeyer, found that a child's poo is linked to their cognitive skills.
There have been previous studies carried out on rodents but this is the first time a connection between intelligence and feces has been established in humans.
For the study, they took samples of stools from 89 different one-year-olds. Those samples were then broken down into different groups according to their composition of bacteria.
A year later, each child that provided a stool sample was tested for their cognitive ability.
The results proved that those with lower cognitive skills had a higher diversity of microbiomes in their poo. In comparison, one group who had a specific type of bacteria in their stool had higher cognitive skills.
Commenting on the results, Rebecca Knickmeyer said:
"The big story here is that we’ve got one group of kids with a particular community of bacteria that's performing better on these cognitive tests.
This is the first time an association between microbial communities and cognitive development has been demonstrated in humans."
