Has anyone tried the Jona gut microbiome test?

[HealthGirly]

Hi-I have been having bloating for a while and my body is weird after some foods I eat 😔. I can't quite pin it down to exactly when and why I get bloating. I read that the microbiome is linked to a lot of different gut issues and GI conditions and is something I can change. I will be trying out this test before thanksgiving/holiday eating and curious to get the results back. Let me know if anyone has done it, seems interesting!

[xjrs]

Please don't bother with a microbiome test. When you get the results back what will you do with that information? If you are experiencing IBS symptoms, in all likelihood you will find one or two dominant bad bugs. Everyone has good bugs and bad bugs in their systems. The important thing is whether the good bugs are keeping the bad bugs under control, which is often not the case with IBS.

The best thing to do is to trial a good probiotic to see if that helps. This is far cheaper than a microbiome test and gets you started on trying to improve the situation. Alflorex worked best for me (Align is the equivalent in the US).

I can say all of this since I went down that rabbit hole. You need a therapist to interpret the tests and they convince you that you need antibiotics or antimicrobials to get rid of the bad bugs. This is the worst thing that you can do, since this destroys the good bugs too, compromises the microbiome even further and makes IBS worse - this happened to me. Please don't go there.

The safest way to adjust the microbiome is through a well studied probiotic to get things back in balance and then eat as wide a variety a diet as possible. This increases bacterial diversity which also helps guard against IBS. The Mediterranean diet is best for the microbiome.

Once symptoms have settled through probiotics, slowly introduce one new food at a time and keep a food diary.

Also, have you been diagnosed with IBS? If you only have bloating you are very lucky. Often bloating is down to gases pooling in the small intestine and not moving through the system properly. This can be down to poor muscle control in the abdominals. General exercise and also core/abdominal exercises might help.

[HealthGirly in reply to xjrs]

I think this report is different than the other ones that just give you a long list of bugs, it shows you what it actually means and sources it from all the scientific studies. I haven't been diagnosed but from what I have seen it can tell you if your microbiome profile matches someone that has IBS and what diet i should adopt. Many probiotics aren't really proven so I rather do food/diet instead. Good to know that only mostly bloating as a symptom is better than usual! I will try working out more too

[xjrs in reply to HealthGirly]

Some probiotics have science behind them:

Alforex contains Bifidobacterium longum 35624, see this study:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/353...

Here's a study for Symprove:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/248...

Ideally any symptoms that aren't usual for you should be discussed with a GP since they may want to run some tests.

[Spaceboy_60]

Probiotics give me a lot of gas and I've never noticed any benefit from my IBS. I think the test could be of some use for sure