The microbiome people are full of shit

Minimizing fiber and drinking heavy cream gives you an amazing microbiome

The microbiome people have always struck me as total charlatans. Kinda like the “brain did obesity” people.

You can bash somebody’s brain in with a hammer, and then his leptin will be dysregulated. You can engineer mice to have a broken leptin system and they will be insatiable and get super obese. Injecting leptin will fix them. Therefore, some scream, THE BRAIN CONTROLS OBESITY! SCIENCE!

Yet injecting leptin works for approximately 0% of obese people. I believe there is a rare genetic condition that is basically equivalent to the engineered mice, and a small handful of people world wide have been diagnosed with it. And leptin therapy helped them.

But clearly, we don’t know jack about how the brain is involved in the diabesity epidemic, and we know even less about how to fix it.

The microbiome story is worse.

So far, the entirety of microbiome knowledge as it relates to obesity seems to be this:

1. We think it’s very important to have a good microbiome, because if you nuke people with antibiotics, they’ll have a bad time

2. Therefore eat fiber & eat yogurt & kefir

This seems pretty nonsensical to me. The argument is usually that there exist bacteria that like to ferment fiber. Ok, we’ve all heard about farts & bloating, sure. But why would those bacteria be the ones we should optimize for?

It seems much more reasonable and likely to me that:

1. If you eat a food regularly, your gut will contain bacteria that thrive on that food

2. If you don’t eat a food, the bacteria requiring that food will die off

Therefore, a gut microbiome is good/effective in relation to your diet, and in a functioning person, self-adjusting.

Ombre Gut Health Test

My friend Matt Quinn recently took an Ombre Gut Health Check microbiome test and posted a video about his results on Twitter. Since he had taken an OmegaQuant Complete test after I talked him into it, I thought it was only fair I took him up when he suggested I test my microbiome as well.

I decided to just get the same test he’d done, cause it would be easier to compare, and it’s available on Amazon.

The thought of testing my poo kind of grossed me out, but it turned out not to be as bad as I expected. You put a cotton swab on your toilet paper after wiping, and shake that in a container of fluid, and that’s it.

Then you wait.

And then you wait some more, cause Ombre doesn’t email you when your test is ready. I had sort of expected them to notify me when my results were in, so I didn’t check their website until it was nearly 2 months later. Turns out, the results had been in for weeks. Ugh.

The tech trouble continues: their website is pretty bad. If you’ve used the OmegaQuant website, it’s not astonishingly high-tech or anything, but things just.. work?

On the Ombre website, many things don’t work. Just today, trying to check something for this post, I couldn’t log in for half an hour. It would just endlessly show a blank page.

Many of the pages with interesting stuff load for a good 10 seconds before you can interact with anything, even type into the search bar, which then triggers another 10 second wait.

Their CSS (which determines what the website looks like) is shot to hell on my 4K monitor:

Surely you meant for these to be centered?

Results: 90%

But, whatever. The results were there, and I was honestly surprised. Surely, as someone who eats less than 3g of fiber a day, or about 60g of vegetables, and drinks most of his cArOliEs in the form of heavy cream in coffee, I’d have a shitty microbiome?

My diet is almost as far from what the microbiome people recommend as possible.

But no:

Wow, turns out my microbiome is great, better than their “community range.”

Let’s check out the 4 subcategories:

Especially my “diversity” of bacteria is apparently amazing at 95%, the very top of their community range.

When it comes to “ecosystem” I am smack in the middle of their range at 88%.

My “comparison” with others is slightly above the middle, at 79%.

The “symptoms” category you could probably ignore, as that’s self-reported via a questionnaire on the website. It asks you thinks like how your digestion goes, if you’re ever constipated or have diarrhea, food intolerances, and so on.

I pretty much picked “perfect” every time except a handful, e.g. one was about fat loss and I picked the corresponding answer there. Something like “Do you have trouble losing weight? Yes, usually.”

I think it’s debatable if that self-reported category should be included. I guess it’s important to know if somebody has great digestion or shitty digestion.

On the other hand, it’s not an objective measurement of anything, and you could massively influence your score when comparing yourself to others. This is where their community range is huge. I guess people who take poop tests are selecting themselves for having bad symptoms. People with great digestion probably don’t bother to take gut health tests.

But since all my objective scores are normal, normal-high, or at the very high end, I’m happy with my result.

Give me more money: Premium

After rewatching Matt’s video, I realized they have a cash grab option: pay another $10 to unlock “premium” features. So I paid another $10.

Lol, shocking.

They have a bunch of categories where they try to estimate from some specific bacterial strain how well your body handles… LDL (lol), atherosclerosis (lol what), serotonin (???) and many other things.

Tbh most of this stuff sounds made up as heck, and I recommend the premium part even less than the normal test.

Oh yea, apparently my gut microbiome is a 50% match for a “heavy person,” a 100% match for an elite skier, and a 100% match for “enhanced cognitive ability.” This might just measure “Scandinavian genetics, as represented by your biome” lol. Do these bacteria CAUSE the Norwegians & Swedes to be great skiers or have good schools? Unlikely.

So there you have it folks, my poo is smarter than yours.

What mean?!

Honestly, I think this just shows that the microbiome fiber kefir probiotic-industrial complex shillfluencers are full of it.

Apparently you can have a great microbiome by eating less than 3g of fiber a day for 2 years, eating 90% fat mostly from dairy, and in fact get most of your food in the form of drinking heavy cream and lots of coffee.

If this doesn’t tell you that fiber is unnecessary, and high-dairy-fat keto is fine, I don’t know what will.

Cut seed oils → great microbiome?

The fact is, my digestion became significantly BETTER after starting on ex150, despite cutting fiber down by over 90%, and completely stopping yogurt. I think if anything in my diet actually improved the quality of my digestion and microbiome, it was probably cutting out the seed oils.

My first few protein refeeds between ex150 bouts I was still eating PUFAs, as I hadn’t found out about Modern PUFA Theory yet and was only thinking about protein restriction.

And after having amazing digestion with the cream on ex150, I suddenly started noticing how terrible my digestion got after even 2-3 days of eating PUFA-laden foods.

Fried chicken was obviously the worst, but even salad dressings from restaurants made my stomach hurt and gave me acid reflux, runny stools, and just general … unease. In retrospect, almost like a low-level fever, where you just feel kinda bad all around.

One of the worst offenders was aioli, which is just mayo with garlic. And all mayo in the U.S. is made out of seed oils, probably soybean oil. But I also ate whole roast chicken with the skin & dark meats, or prepackaged chicken salad (keto!) from the store.

Turns out the sauce in the salad is entirely made of soybean oil.

I had originally planned to allow ex150 + social exceptions, where I would eat at restaurants with friends when out and about.

But I stopped that, because eating at a restaurant even once made me feel so terrible. The seed oils were everywhere, and they just ruined my week. And I realized that most restaurant food doesn’t even taste good. It’s just some lettuce with some overcooked chicken thrown on top, drenched in soybean oil sauce. If they didn’t put flavoring in the sauce, you wouldn’t eat that stuff.

Recommendations

Number 1, don’t bother doing this test, or any other microbiome test. I think they’re useless. I think the microbiome shillfluencers are full of shit. You know better than anyone how good your digestion is.

If you eat an “ancestral-style” diet, i.e. no seed oils or things that have PUFAs snuck in (fatty pork/chicken), your microbiome will likely adapt to whatever you’re eating habitually, and reflect that.

You already know if you have great digestion or not. If not, clearly something’s not right. I doubt the test would tell you what, or how to fix it.

So cut the PUFAs if you’re not already doing that. Try lowering your fiber intake. It might be fine to eat lots of fiber in the long run, but if your gut is wrecked from PUFAs, the abrasive nature of indigestible fiber (“roughage”) might be irritating instead of helpful.

I’ve always felt better on lower fiber. Less bloat, less acid reflux, better digestion. Maybe I can magically eat entire heads of broccoli and feel great once I’m sufficiently de-PUFA’d. And if not, who cares.

Fuck fiber.