You may remember a post Robb did about The American Gut Project back in August. Well, The American Gut Project is now live!
I’m sure you’ve all heard about the importance of the gut microbiome, it’s effects on health, digestion, immunity, weight loss/gain, etc. Now anyone in America (and even their pets) can join the study and have their gut microbiome sequenced, getting a list of their gut bugs and other cool stuff. Based on this data (and a detailed diet and lifestyle questionnaire), they will be able to compare everyone’s samples to each other.
Are you curious how healthy your gut bacteria really are? Maybe you want to know how diet affects gut bacteria composition? Perhaps you would like to find out who has the healthiest gut population: paleo eaters, people eating a Standard American Diet (SAD), vegetarians, vegans, or maybe someone who eats nothing but chicken nuggets? We could even see how your gut microbiome compares to, say Michael Pollan and other omnivores, or to people with a high or low BMI, folks living in the city vs. rural areas, real hunter-gatherer tribes, folks on a gluten-free diet, people with IBD/Crohns, or people with autoimmune conditions. There are 10 times the amount of bacterial cells in our guts (trillions) as there are in our bodies, lets find out more about them!
Go with your gut, and check out the project here http://www.indiegogo.com/
Daytona says
Poop for Science?! This is research I can really get behind. Count me in!
Morgan says
What a great project! Shame I’m from the UK otherwise you could count me in. I wonder when we will see some results/research from it?
Andria says
This is cool, but what happened to the link??
Meagan Lemke says
The Link seems to be broken?
Amy Kubal says
Try this! http://humanfoodproject.com/american-gut/
Burn says
The link does not work!
Sienna says
No, the link doesn’t work for me either.
Amy Kubal says
How about this – http://humanfoodproject.com/american-gut/
joanna says
wow this is very cool. wish it wasn’t so expensive. i’d have it done if i could.