Errors and chemicals in your poor how to give exactly what you eat

It was difficult to find specific worms associated with certain foods, but the presence of a specific microbe was a strong indicator of whether a person drank coffee or not. Basically, if you’re a coffee drinker, the microbes in your stool will give you that.

The new study by Hannah Holscher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleagues takes a slightly different approach. Here, the team looked at stool samples from volunteers who ate certain foods each day. So instead of looking at the presence of microbes, Holscher’s team looked for metabolites—the chemicals that microbes produce when they break down food.

The team looked at the effects of six specific foods: almonds, avocados, broccoli, walnuts, barley and oats. The researchers first looked to see if there was any relationship between the metabolites in popcorn and whether a particular person ate one of these foods. They used whatever patterns they identified to infer that other people ate the same food.

Again, it was tricky – but the team was able to tell whether people ate almonds, broccoli or walnuts with 80 to 87% accuracy depending on their diet. The study was published online on the preprint server bioRxiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed. But it builds on the same work that the team published last year.

Studies like these provide insight into the future of fecal analysis. It is early days, and the accuracy of these tests may improve in the coming years. But the ability to understand the impact of individual foods on our microbiomes and our health could revolutionize research and nutrition. “This is really the next frontier,” says Emily Leaming, a nutrition scientist at Zoe who supported Berry’s research.

Holscher’s team hopes to improve nutrition research. Studies that aim to find out how certain foods affect our health usually rely on volunteers to keep food diaries. They are a pain to maintain, and are often inaccurate or incomplete. Analyzing one’s poor instead may one day provide a painless alternative.