

One of the areas of interest I identified at the beginning of the Mayday Project was gut health, fostering and maintaining a thriving culture of flora in my intestines. I’ve been challenged to lose weight and this has increased over the last several years. My gut has taken a lot of punches, metaphorically. I’ve had radiation for cancer, right in my abdomen. I’ve taken some pretty harsh antibiotics for some infections. I don’t have a history of eating well. It’s understandable if my gut bacteria are not a thriving culture.
I signed up to get a culture of my gut through a company called uBiome, the first sequencing-based microbiome screening test. The website is easy to use and I ordered a package of three tests, to get a picture of my gut health over the next year. The package arrived in the mail after a few weeks and I finally got around to testing at the end of June. A simple mess-free swab is all that is needed, then it’s placed in a tube and mailed to the lab.
Diversity
According to my test results, I am in the 86th percentile of samples, which means that 86% of the samples submitted have a less diverse biome. uBiome places a diversity score of 8 of 10 on my sample. Though it is not unclear the importance of diversity in the sample, I was encouraged that my stomach was hospitable to a lot of different types of bacteria.

Weight Loss
According to uBiome:
Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes are the largest phyla in the human microbiome.
Studies have shown that gut microbiomes tilted in favor of Bacteroidetes are correlated with weight loss and lean body types.
Gut microbiomes in Western cultures are usually skewed in favor of Firmicutes, which can increase with higher caloric intake.
My gut biome has more Firmicutes than Bacteriodetes by a ratio of 1.4:1, which seems in line with a basic Western diet. I was surprised that this was well below the average ratio of 2.1:1, a .7 difference which means I have more Bacteriodetes than the average samples. I thought I might get a picture here where the bacteria were out of balance, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Probiotics
When evaluating probiotics, they were almost non-existent in my sample. This was troubling, but I believe more testing is required to evaluate this further. uBiome states:
Certain strains of Lactobacillus have been shown to improve mental health, including anxiety and mood, in addition to improving gut health.
A very low number of Lactobacillus were reported in my sample, about 0.08 times the amount of the average sample. This seemed shockingly low and could be an area of improvement.

I researched probiotics and it appears that there are a number of ways to ingest probiotics, such as live bacteria cultures like yogurt and kefir, or fermented foods like kimchi, saurkraut, pickles, and kombucha, or natural, unprocessed foods like raw milk, honey and cheese. Natual food stores, like Whole Foods, sell probiotic supplements in pill form or in liquid shooters. All of these could be useful to introduce probiotics into the digestive tract.

These probiotics don’t always get to the right place. Imagine the digestive tract is like a subway, and these probiotics are trying to get to work, if they don’t take the right train, they’ll never get there. The train in this example is food and some foods make it farther than others in the GI. Simple sugars and carbohydrates may be digested early on, and feed the bacteria towards the top of the GI. However, proteins and fiber and complex carbohydrates take longer to digest and make it further down the line, giving nutrition to the bacteria in the lower parts of the tract. A combination of probiotics and the right foods to support them are crucial to establishing healthy microflora.

Very Elusive Bacteria
Finally, the report listed the Very Elusive Bacteria. If bacteria in the gut are like Pokémon, these are the Legendary Pokémon that are hard to find. In reality, there may be no benefit to “catch them all.” In my sample, there were seven very elusive bacteria. As uBiome cautions:
Seldom seen bacteria are less likely to have been studied in depth, but the rarity of these specimens does not indicate they are beneficial or harmful.
At this point, it’s too early to tell the effects on these bacteria.

Conclusion
This test provided a lot of interesting information on my journey to understand gut health. I still have two more tests which I’m planning to use in October and February. uBiome will then compare the tests and let me know if there is any change. It’s easy to take this too seriously like other medical tests, but this is just one sample, one snapshot of my gut. It may be that my test did not accurately reflect my microflora in general. I’m going to focus on more probiotic foods and foods that support a rich probiotic environment and experiment with different fermented foods to make my gut as hospitable as possible.▪️
The Mayday Project is a personal, total wellness plan. These essays will track my progress and development of the plan. Please follow for tips, ideas, inspiration and what not to do when you’re changing your life.
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