snowathlete
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Richard Sprague's tool is useful. It helps you compare two samples, so you can see which bacteria became extinct between the two samples ('are absent' would probably be more accurate). And which are new (unique in each sample).Did you? I couldn't fathom my uBiome results.
One of the issues with the uBiome and American Gut labs is that their results can vary significantly if you take two fecal samples from different parts of the same stool. See the following article, where the author sent away three different samples from the same piece of stool, to be analyzed by uBiome and American Gut:
Which bacteria are in my poop? It depends where you look
This variation probably occurs because the food you eat makes a great deal of difference as to which bacteria grow on that day, and presumably one stool could comprise the food from more than one meal, or could comprise different parts of the same meal (main course versus dessert).
The good news, though, was that uBiome and American Gut produced similar results from a piece of feces taken from exactly the same spot on the stool.
Perhaps the only thing of reliable scientific value in these high-throughput sequencing microbiome analyses is the actual species of bacteria you have present; the relative population sizes of these species, which can vary from day to day, and vary even within the same stool, probably has little meaning.
The tests have limitations, certainly, but I still think they are very useful, and for the cost are well worth it. There can be variation but I suspect there is more variation if you have slow digestion and varied diet, than if you have high transit time and less variation in diet (personally, this probably works in my favour).
You may be able to minimize the variability by homogonizing the stool you take your sample from.
I haven't used American Gut, but from a few results I've seen posted on the net, I wonder if they are not as good as uBiome.
Some bacteria have had a lot of research, others practically none. But there is a lot of research out there on certain bacteria which are considered to be key to gut health, that appear in a high proportion of healthy guts, but are absent or low in diseased individuals. There is a lot more strength of data from IBD research for instance than there is for ME/CFS.
There are conflicting papers out there about gut bacteria and what is healthy though, so you have to be careful what you believe, and this extends to what people say on blogs and so on with suggestions about which supplements to take and so on. My approach is to read a lot of research and try things, but slowly; I don't think there are any quick fixes, but I think you can improve your gut health gradually. I'd be wary about making any major decisions based on a single sample, overal trends seen across multiple samples likely paint a more accurate picture.
Because of the scarcity of genera/species available as probiotic, prebiotics and diet are my main tool for trying to control what is in my gut.
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