SmartGut: Why are people sending their poop in the post?

It's all in the name of science

Would you send your poop for testing? (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Have you got gut issues? Well, it’s time to stop self-diagnosing because there’s now a new, science-based, gut-friendly solution.

Thanks to San Francisco based biotech company UBiome, unravelling your health issues has never been easier. All you need is a swab, a poo sample, and an envelope.

Having recently launched SmartGut, a service designed to categorise the microbiome - the trillions of bacteria that live in your bowels - UBiome are able to give individuals access to a comprehensive screening test that will help to identify what’s causing their health problems.

Now, this might sound like a load of crap - literally - but there’s actually a whole lot of scientific evidence to support it.

A healthy, balanced microbiome plays a significant role in everything from training our immune system to regulating metabolism - and even sends signals to our brain that can affect mood, anxiety and appetite.

So, knowing more about our guts and making an effort to discover what microbes are living there, could signal the future of personalised healthcare.

Currently, medical science does not yet know what an ideal microbiome looks like but still, doctors and dieticians insist that probiotic supplements - most of which haven’t gone through clinical trials - can help to alleviate a myriad of gastrointestinal problems.

That’s where SmartGut comes in. The clinical test identifies and tallies a group of known, “good” bacteria in a patient’s gut and compares them to profiles from hundreds of healthy individuals.

This way, it can assess overall health based on levels of certain healthy bacteria and those known to be related to disease or obesity.

Sure, sending your poop in the post might not be ideal but over the course of using SmartGut combined with a recommended probiotics regimen, you could theoretically watch your microbiome improve, saving you a bunch of trips to the doctor.