You Are What You Eat

Or, more precisely, you are what you eat eats. Here we explore the wild and diverse world of your gut microbiome and its critical role in your total body health—from head to toe.

- Rene Ebersole

At a recent dinner party to celebrate a friend’s birthday, I met a gregarious German woman in her 60s who had just tried one of those DNA testing kits to learn about her family history. “Everyone is doing it,” she said, smiling and laughing, speaking in a thick accent. “You just spit into a tube, swoosh it around, and drop it in the mail! Then you receive an email with your results. It’s fun!”

I immediately wanted to tell her about the mail-order test tube kit that I’d just tried, but my husband intervened. “Wait,” he said, “people are still eating.”

Intestinal bacteria, stool samples, and bowel movements are hardly polite dinner conversation. When the dishes were all cleared, I shared that I’d recently done something similar to those DNA kits, but instead of spitting into a tube, I swabbed a piece of used toilet paper. I was testing my gut microbiome, not only for curiosity but also because I was hoping to collect a few clues about some health issues.