Should You Map Your Microbiome?

Biologists are beginning to understand how the trillions of microbes in and on our bodies shape our health. But differences between any two people’s microbial populations are enormous. Most people share around 99 percent of their DNA with the person next to them, but they have a significantly smaller percentage of their microbes in common. In this episode of If Our Bodies Could Talk, senior editor James Hamblin visits uBiome, a company attempting to provide direct-to-consumer information about what everyone’s microbes might mean for their health. At the moment, however, the science of personal microbe mapping may be too nascent to take seriously.

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