The American Gut Project is a unique science investigation, featuring some of the world’s best scientists and YOU, as a citizen, contributing funding and also microbial data from your body, from your kids, from your pets. Your choice. Rob Knight, at CU-Boulder, is a leader of the investigation. This project strives to find out what’s in YOUR gut, when it comes to microbes. Why? Well, while there at 10 trillion of your cells in your body, there are 100 trillion microbes, and it’s becoming more clear by the week that the health of those microbes has a huge affect on our human health. Beneficial microbes can keep bad bugs at bay and create useful byproducts from their own digestion, that benefit us in the form of vitamins and other nutrients. Too much sugar and junk food, pollution and overuse of antibiotics are ways that we can harm the “good guy” microbes. A healthy lifestyle seems to help those microbes stay healthier, AND help us. – Shelley
PROJECT OVERVIEW: What IS the American Gut Project?
HOW TO . . .
This section is for people who have signed up for the American Gut Project and have now received their testing kits. It features CU Scientist, Rob Knight, demonstrating the right ways (and some of the wrong ways) to get samples of your personal microbes (Videos thanks to shelley schlender on Voice of America and on Vimeo.)
