17d • General discussion
Same poop, seven labs, seven different answers
@agingroy (on X)
Same poop, seven labs, seven different answers. NIST proved it. About 30 companies will sequence your stool and mail you a verdict on your health, and the one thing that decides whether it's worth anything is the sequencing method, which they bury in the fine print. Seven consumer gut tests, grouped by how deeply they actually read:
1. TINY HEALTH (
). Deep shotgun sequencing, which reads bacteria down to the exact strain, run in a certified clinical lab. It's built for babies and mums, where a gut is still assembling itself in the first year and the exact strain matters most. You get a report and a call with a specialist. $219, United States.
2. ZOE (
). Shotgun too, and the only one here with a randomized trial of its own, called METHOD, built on PREDICT, a 34,000-person study that observed what people ate rather than dosing them. It's a coaching membership, so what you get is an app that scores foods, not your raw microbe list. Price is in flux during a site relaunch, historically around $100 a year. US, UK, Ireland, Netherlands.
3. JONA (
). The widest net here, shotgun sequencing that reads bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites, then an AI that summarizes the research for you. Good method, but that AI advice has never been clinically tested, and at $485 it's the priciest on the list. United States.
4. VIOME (
). The only one reading RNA instead of DNA, so it measures what your microbes are actively doing rather than just who's present. The catch is that it exists to sell you its own supplements based on the result, and the RNA method is still debated by scientists. About $199, ships internationally.
5. EVVY (
). Vaginal, not gut, shotgun sequenced and reviewed by a clinician who can route you to a prescription. It's the one test here with published accuracy numbers, 93% sensitivity against a clinical standard. $159, United States only.
6. BIOMESIGHT (
). Cheaper 16S sequencing, which reaches the genus, the family a bug belongs to, but can't name the exact species. What it does that almost none of the others will: it gives you your raw data to keep, and it ships worldwide. About $113, global.
7. OMBRE (
). Also 16S, genus-level, and really a funnel to match you to its own probiotic subscription, so read the result knowing what it's built to sell. $229.99, United States.
Here's why the method matters.
@NIST split one identical stool sample and sent it to seven consumer companies three times each. The number of microbes they reported ranged from 34 to 906, and of the 1,208 organisms named across the entire test, exactly three appeared in every sample.
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Same poop, seven labs, seven different answers
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