Look, there’s nothing like starting your day by pooping on a little paper hammock attached to your toilet seat and then poking it a few times with a cotton swab. It was more of a mental hurdle than a practical one, as assembly and disposal (just rinse the hammock down when you’re done) was easy enough. Next, dip the stick into the solution, cover it, and send it out. Twenty days later, I received an email with my results.
On the website, your results are broken down into a few sections: Summary (with tabs for Brain Health, Digestive Health, Metabolic Health, Skin Health, and Physical Performance), Action Plan (with tabs for Higher Impact, Diet, Lifestyle, and Probiotics), and the Organisms page, which shows you each organism found in your sample, and their relative abundance. It brought me some surprises.
On the plus side, my microbiome diversity came in at 4.19, which is above average (the normal range is 2.80-3.99, as measured by Shannon index), which she says is a sign of a healthy microbiome, and found no pathogens or parasites. It says I digest lactose well (thank God). No associations were found for things like depression, celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, leaky gut, high blood pressure, eczema, or a host of other things that I’m grateful don’t exist. Some of this stuff was actually a little puzzling, honestly, since I’ve suffered from insomnia almost my whole life, but I’ve never found any connection there, or with fatigue, and I’m definitely a tired person.
As for the correlations I found, some were things I suspected, while others were complete surprises. Within brain health, I had a moderate association with stress and a low association with ADHD, neither of which shocked me. Under metabolic health, there was a “very low” association for prediabetes, which I thought would be higher, unfortunately. I had a moderate association with osteoarthritis, which makes sense, given my family history.