{"id":939,"date":"2018-11-01T16:28:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T23:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/wordpress\/?p=939"},"modified":"2025-08-04T13:04:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T20:04:10","slug":"are-microbiome-diagnostic-tests-worth-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/?p=939","title":{"rendered":"I Took an At-Home Poop Test"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4><span style=\"color: #999999;\">Rob Knight explains about the At-Home Poop Test Kits here: <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a style=\"color: #999999; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en\/article\/are-microbiome-diagnostic-tests-worth-it\/\">&#8220;I Took an At-Home Poop Test&#8221;<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"color: #999999;\">&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #999999;\">\u201c[The kits] are very much about scientific discovery. It\u2019s going to be biased and it\u2019s not going to be complete,\u201d 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 <a style=\"color: #999999;\" href=\"http:\/\/humanfoodproject.com\/americangut\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">testing kit<\/a>.) These tests can probably tell you if you have a serious bacterial infection, he says, but they can\u2019t yet diagnose patients with diseases and are unlikely to reliably provide the kind of personalized information they claim they will.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #999999;\">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\u2019d 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\u2019t be able to tell you much, except for the species of bugs that make up your microbiome.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #999999;\">&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rob Knight explains about the At-Home Poop Test Kits here: &#8220;I Took an At-Home Poop Test&#8221; &#8230; \u201c[The kits] are very much about scientific discovery. It\u2019s going to be biased<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":938,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=939"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1619,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939\/revisions\/1619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}