ALL KNOWLEDGE
LABORATORY2 Jul 2026 · 11 min · Dr. Helena Costa

Your microbiome test, read honestly

Gut sequencing is genuinely useful and routinely oversold. Both things are true and the gap between them is where most disappointment lives.

A microbiome panel is a photograph of a moving thing.
Colonies at varying density
Diversity is the stable signal. Most of the rest moves week to week.

What it can tell you

Diversity, which is reasonably stable and broadly meaningful.
The presence of specific organisms worth knowing about.
A rough sense of fibre fermentation capacity.

What it cannot

It cannot tell you which foods to eat. Predictions of that kind exceed the evidence by a wide margin, and the same sample sent to two providers will often produce two different sets of recommendations.

WHAT THIS IS NOTThis is a pattern written for a general reader. It is not a reading of your results and it is not a diagnosis. If something here matches what you are seeing in your own data, that is a question for a doctor, not a conclusion.