“Wow, your gut microbiome score is right up there… it might even be higher than Tim’s!”

I’m sitting on a Zoom call with Zoe nutritionist Dr Federica Amati. The Tim in question? Only the gut king himself, Zoe founder Dr Tim Spector. I’ve just finished the Zoe gut test – the largest nutrition science study in the world – and my results are reassuringly decent. Sure, there’s some room for improvement but on the whole, my lifestyle seems to be paying off.

“We call people like you a ‘unicorn’ – you’re only the second person I’ve seen with these kinds of results,” says Dr Amati. “Great blood fat control, good sugar control and really good microbiome scores.”

I’m almost pathetically happy, because it’s proof that after 10 months of really focusing on supporting my gut health, things are ticking along in the right direction. On 1 January this year, inspired by Dr Spector’s Instagram page and my former colleague Chloe, I decided to eat a minimum of 30 plants a week every week – and 11 months on, I’ve not missed that goal once. My Notes app is packed with lists of nuts, fruits and grains. And yet interestingly, the Zoe test reveals that my gut microbiome isn’t diverse at all. It scores rock-bottom for diversity, but among the very top for its ratio of ‘good’ to ‘bad’ bacteria. So, what’s that all about? 

To give you an idea of how popular this once-pretty-obscure gut experiment is: last month, I was at the Emirates Stadium watching Arsenal WFC chuck away the first home game of the season, and my dad spent most of the match pointing out all the other Gooners sporting the same bright yellow Zoe sticker as me on their arms.

That sticker covers the blood sugar monitor that you’re given to wear continuously for two weeks. On day one of the test, you’re asked to eat a packet of (absolutely delicious) vegan cookies for breakfast. After a four-hour fast, you then have to eat a second packet of (this time blue) cookies. Two hours later, you take a blood test and a poo sample, pop them in the post and the intensive testing is done. 

For the next two weeks, you track everything you eat in the Zoe app and monitor the impact that food has on your blood glucose in real time. 

The gut test

The poo sample looks at the make-up of your gut microbiome. That tells you what kinds of bugs you have in there, how many types you’ve got and whether they’re helpful or harmful. The blood test – taken two hours after that second batch of cookies (I cannot stress enough how delicious they are) looks at how well your body deals with fat. Those afternoon cookies are also blue, and you’re supposed to record the moment you see that food dye coming out in the poo (it took me about 16 hours).

My results came back showing an abundance of good bacteria and very little bad bacteria – great news! But my microbial diversity is low, and given how much experts seem to stress this as a key indicator of gut health, that sounded worrying.  

However, the science on gut diversity is changing. On reading my results, Dr Amati immediately asks if I’m vegan, which I am. “Your diversity is low because you have fewer microbes – and that’s because you don’t eat certain foods,” she says. “But this is why we’ve moved away from diversity as this all-important scoring metric. 

“Just because you have low diversity, it doesn’t mean that your gut microbiome isn’t good. In fact, you’ve got an excellent gut microbiome, because the guys you do have are all really helpful.

“A lot of people still use diversity as a marker, but vegans especially and vegetarians always have less diversity because they don’t need any microbes to break down animal fat or protein. And that’s actually what alerted Tim to the fact that diversity isn’t a good score.”

Dr Spector was running a twin cohort study in which a lot of twins were vegan. He found that the vegan twins had lower gut diversity but were actually healthier than their non-vegan siblings.

The current Zoe test scores are based on the results of 35,000 people and look at 100 bacteria that are strongly associated with health outcomes. “You can have a very wide range of bacteria [and] most of them [not be] helpful,” Dr Amati confirms. “Tim’s analogy is that it’s like trying to create a basketball team. If you had a [large] range of players, some of whom were accountants and lawyers, that wouldn’t be very useful. It’s far better to know whether you have a few really good basketball players.” 

The blood fat test

This is a simple finger-prick test. You’ve got to get quite a lot of blood out and then drip it onto a card. Once fully dried, you pop it into the envelope and send it away. 

Blood fat is heavily influenced by exercise and training, which is something I try to do every day. Mercifully, my training is paying off with what Dr Amati calls “excellent blood fat control”. I don’t seem to have the inflammatory spike of triglycerides after eating fatty foods. 

The blood sugar test

From a testing point of view, the most interesting aspect is definitely the live blood sugar tracking. Some findings were pretty common-sense; having ice cream in the evening didn’t cause any real spike because I always have pudding within 30 minutes of a healthy, hearty meal. However, I was surprised to see how dramatically my glucose readings were affected by two ingredients I eat all the time and which I always thought were pretty healthy: semolina and corn.

My mum has ulcerative colitis and when I was growing up, she had a number of awful flareups that made eating anything difficult – but especially bread. The only bread-y type thing she didn’t struggle with was the Algerian semolina bread my dad bought every Saturday, which became a household staple. Because she was able to eat it, I assumed it was super healthy – and yet, I had my biggest blood glucose spike and dip after eating a semolina pancake at that Arsenal match. 

It happened again the next day after I had a slice of semolina bread for breakfast, even with olive oil and za’atar smeared on top. That rollercoaster was matched once more when I had tacos for dinner, filled with refried beans, tofu, faijta-seasoned peppers and salad.  

When I ask Dr Amati why these foods had such a dramatic impact on me, she points to the fact that they’re both super-refined carbs. “Semolina is just ground-up, refined wheat. It’s full of free starches,” she explains (which would be why my mum was able to eat it during a flare-up; fibre is really hard to process during an episode). These foods aren’t unhealthy – that’s the point of the Zoe app and test. No foods are off-limits and no foods are ‘bad’. It’s just about finding out how foods affect you and how what you eat might better serve you.

This was the part of the test on which I scored ‘good’ rather than ‘excellent’, and it’s one I’d like to improve on. Dr Amati tells me that around 40% of our blood sugar control is genetic – so it’s the tougher metric to change.

However, there are things I can do, like following the plan that’s been set for me using my results on the Zoe app. There, it’s got various meals, food pairings and blood sugar-friendly snack ideas for me to use. And that’s going to be the focus of my next new year’s resolution – to improve that score so that the next time I try the Zoe test, it’s a full house. 

Images: Getty