Are you curious about what which bacteria, fungi and virus make up your gut? There are two popular sites available that will send you a summary of the microbes their testing has revealed. uBiome starts at $89 and has testing options available for up to $399. They are fast and have an app to review your results. The second is American Gut. AG has a reputation for being slower on results and slightly more expensive.

While it is cool that we can see a relative comparison to other people with similar age, diet, gender, BMI, etc. There are some issues. The first is that it is still the Wild West of microbiome testing.  It’s new and most doctors are not ready to interpret these results (yet).  There are also concerning reports of radically different test results between uBiome and American Gut. The Microbiome Quality Control Project is out to resolve these sorts of discrepancies with their standardized methods and tools for different body sites. The good news is that the more data that is collected the more we can potentially learn about ourselves.