Look, there’s nothing quite like starting your day by pooping on a little paper hammock affixed to your toilet seat and then poking it a bunch of times with a cotton swab. It was more of a mental hurdle than a practical one, though, as the collection and disposal (you just flush the hammock down when you’re done) was easy enough. You then swish the stick around in a solution, cap it, and send it off. Twenty days later, I got an email that my results were in.
On the website, your results are broken down into a few sections: Summary (with tabs for Brain Health, GI Health, Metabolic Health, Skin Health, and Physical Performance), Action Plan (with tabs for Highest Impact, Diet, Lifestyle, and Probiotics), and the Organisms page, which shows you every single organism it found in your sample, and their relative abundance. Mine held some surprises.
On the positive side, my Microbiome Diversity came in at 4.19, which is above average (normal range is 2.80–3.99, as measured by the Shannon Index), which it says is a sign of a healthy microbiome, and it didn’t find any pathogens or parasites. It says I digest lactose well (thank goodness). It didn’t find any associations for things like depression, celiac disease, IBS, ulcerative colitis, leaky gut, hypertension, eczema, or a bunch of other things that I’m thankful to not have. Some of these were actually a bit puzzling, frankly, as I’ve struggled with insomnia pretty much my entire life, but it didn’t find any associations there, or for fatigue, and I am most assuredly a tired human.
As far as associations that it did find, some were things I suspected, while others were total surprises. Under Brain Health, I had a moderate association for stress and a low association for ADHD, neither of which shocked me. Under Metabolic health was a “very low” association for prediabetes, which I actually thought would be higher, unfortunately. I had a moderate association with osteoarthritis, which made sense, given my family history.
