Finding out what gut microbes a person carries may not be as easy as many companies advertise.
Seven direct-to-consumer microbiome testing companies each got three identical fecal samples but returned different results about which gut microbes were present, researchers report February 26 in Communications Biology.
The results highlight discrepancies among companies that claim to give consumers insight about their gut health. That matters because consumers may take probiotics they don’t need, change their diets in harmful ways or even get fecal transplants based on inaccurate microbiome test results, say researchers from the University of Maryland in Baltimore and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. (Molecular