Rob Knight explains about the At-Home Poop Test Kits here: “I Took an At-Home Poop Test”
…
“[The kits] are very much about scientific discovery. It’s going to be biased and it’s not going to be complete,” says Rob Knight, co-founder of the American Gut Project and professor at University of California, San Diego. (The American Gut Project also sells a testing kit.) These tests can probably tell you if you have a serious bacterial infection, he says, but they can’t yet diagnose patients with diseases and are unlikely to reliably provide the kind of personalized information they claim they will.
Knight explains the tests might be able to provide guidelines for a very specific sample population but if you try and generalize those results to a more diverse population you’d need to re-do an entire study. In other words, unless you fit the exact profile of the study they used to analyze your gut bacteria, your results probably won’t be able to tell you much, except for the species of bugs that make up your microbiome.
…
