Introduction

In recent years, the gut seems to be gathering fascination from scientific to lay experts and consumers around the world. Unlike the spleen, the windpipes, or any other bodily organ, the gut carries the most wonder, even shame, with its ability to process daily meals in a manner that is both mundane and mysterious. To reveal such a mystery, popular science literature, documentaries, and social media channels have been clamouring about what one should do to care for one’s gut, all for the promise of improving one’s health. One such instantiation, we argue, signals a change in the discourse that raises concerns about what politics are hidden in the hyper-fixation of the gut in the contemporary mediascape.

Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut was released in April 2024 on Netflix, reaching top ten status on the platform in 42 countries globally (Nayar n.d.). The documentary features Giulia Enders, author of Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (2015), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into several languages.Footnote 1 The success of her book inspired an international travelling exhibit, as well as a TED Talk that, as of this writing, has garnered over 5 million views (Enders 2017), which makes this documentary Enders’ third instance of gut whispering. One could argue that Enders is the smiling face of the modern gut, renowned enough to where she serves as a visual throughline in Netflix’s Hack Your Health (HYH hereafter). Although it remains unclear who approached whom for the making of HYH, the rapid popularisation and mediatisation of Enders’ work serves as a premise for reaching wider audiences. We do not lay our argument at the feet of Enders (or even the film director for that matter); rather, we call attention to how a modern fascination with the gut has enabled one particular scientific framing about gut health that, unreflexively, prescribes diet as a means to hack one’s overall health.

We see HYH as the first symptom towards diagnosing a new strain of healthism, one that fixates on the gut—and the microbes it holds—for hacking broader instantiations of health, including mental health, neurotypicity, and immune function. Under the guise of a holistic approach to one’s health, hacking the gut calls in additional forms of scientific expertise to understand the role of microbes. These include experts beyond microbiologists, like neuroscientists and computational biologists, who hold specialisations in areas such as brain functions and big data. Curiously, these microbial experts also seem to hold sway over food, cooking practices, and even disordered eating (i.e., the expertise of dietitians, cooks, and countless other food experts). But HYH shows how the recent swell in microbiome science makes these new and additional forms of expertise the broker of gut health because of microbes that most laypeople cannot understand or detect. So, although microbes are the target for gut health in HYH, food is the hack, which allows for claims in dietary advice to come from experts further afield.

Our argument is not one of ‘stay in your lane.’ Instead, we raise concerns about how the increasingly complex interconnectivity between guts, microbes, foods, environments, politics, and discourses get smoothed into one neat diet prescription in HYH: 'always be counting' one’s fruit and vegetable intake. The prescription itself is nothing new. The refrain to eat more fruits and vegetables has been around for multiple decades, and this advice may very well be sound, albeit fraught when considering additional questions like access to and affordability of consistent fresh produce. What is new is the microbial factor: because gut microbiomes are unique based on an accumulation of one’s life situations, every eating event becomes a time to reintroduce microbes into one’s body. Diet becomes a personalised summons for every eater to maximise one’s produce intake and to steer the microbial composition inside an individual (gut) towards an undetermined ideal. Thus, the overall health that gut hacks promise hinges upon individualised microbial abundance and biodiversity, which obfuscates the question of who ought to take responsibility for gut health, and how.

We conceptualise this obfuscation as a kind of microbial decoy, microbes call in more-than-food expertise, which frames science as a purportedly necessary broker for understanding (gut) health. The resulting over-emphasis on microbes enables scientific expertise to be the sole arbiter of gut hacks, which hides political questions about structural and systemic change and instead responsibilises individuals to simply eat better. HYH demonstrates how microbiome experts become the conduit for understanding microbes, microbes are the conduit for understanding gut health, and gut health is the conduit for actuating better overall health (Fig. 1). This configuration places a spotlight on microbes and the gut in which they live. As the opening of HYH puts it, 'We really just think about our gut as a place where our poop comes from. But it turns out to be the centre of a biomedical revolution.'

Fig. 1
figure 1

How microbial science becomes the arbiter of overall health.

Full size image

This paper analyses HYH as a cultural artefact produced by and producing modern health discourses, with attention to the gut and the microbes there. Because HYH mediates health discourse through scientific expertise, we scrutinise how this expertise brokers the knowledge to reveal the gut’s inner (microbial) workings. Taking inspiration from Julie Guthman’s critique of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma—which, over two decades ago, directed attention to similar discourses about what to eat and how to go about it—we look to HYH and ask, 'To what kind of politics does this lead?' (Guthman 2013, 78). At the time, Guthman’s concern was that Pollan promulgated a 'highly privileged and apolitical idea and reinforces the belief that some people—in this case, thin people—clearly must have seen the light that the rest are blind to' (78–79). We see parallels in gut discourses insofar as gut hacks disembody the microbial gut from the eating body, inching towards a depoliticisation of bodies and foods in so doing.

Background: gut discourses thus far

Recent gut discourses have turned its attention to the trillions of microbes in microbiome research. Microbes are everywhere, for millennia and evermore, but difficult to see or sense by the senses alone, and even harder to study in their non-isolated, diverse communities. Owing to technological breakthroughs from the Human Genome Project and its subsequent Human Microbiome Project, scientists can now study microbes in situ (inside bodies) and in community (with other microbes) to ascertain how exactly microbes inside and on our bodies contribute to human health.

Outside of the biomedical sciences, attention towards the gut has been growing from the humanities (e.g. Wilson 2015, Richardson 2024, Mathias 2024, Walton 2024) and social sciences (Raffaetá 2022, Benezra 2023, Wolf-Meyer 2024), with perspectives that trace the historical, political, and institutional processes of how the organ and its microbes are conceptualised and intervened upon. Applied and empirical studies about guts tend to take place in laboratory settings, to better articulate how microbes shape and are shaped by human health and society. Most of this research runs parallel to what some have termed a ‘microbial turn’ (Paxson and Helmreich 2014, Helmreich 2014; Brives and Zimmer 2021), where microbes are understood to play a more vital role in human, more-than-human, and environmental thriving than previously thought.

In particular, social scientists in/near microbiome research have been calling for better collaborations with disciplines outside of the life sciences, given the challenges related to an academic industrial complex and the race to publish (Benezra 2023), to neo-colonial imposition of race relations (Hobart and Maroney 2019), to concerns that emerge from epistemological and commercial implications generated by new knowledge (Greenhough et al. 2020), and to the choice of medium/message for effective but critical science communication (Ironstone 2019). However, unlike other organs that host microbes (e.g. the skin, vagina), the gut garners notable amounts of attention, both from professional and lay persons. Perhaps it is the gut’s concentration of microbes that makes it a potent driver for academic and existential enquiry: 'at the (literal) bodily centre of us, we find not some solid, essential core, but the rest of the world. We are literally tubes full of other organisms' writes philosopher Lisa Heldke (2018, 248, original emphasis).

Critiques on gut interventions and testing are also a growing area of research. Sandra Widmer (2021) found that direct-to-consumer testing kits that analyse one’s gut microbiome positioned individualised gut data as a means to assess and invest in one’s gut health, and thus one’s future wellbeing. The financialisation of one’s health deliberately markets to those who can afford to remediate their gut health: 'the test appeals to individuals who have the budget and can make the dietary changes' (3). Kateřina Kolářová and colleagues (2022) studied communities of people living with chronic gut conditions, like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and mapped their tactics that differed from singularised understandings of eating and digestion. By studying extant practices of this community, they show 'the stark limitations of the concept of universalised human metabolism' propounded by scientific and biomedical institutions (13). Both studies highlight how scientised, medicalised, and universalised solutions via the gut are unattainable, overbearing, or outright ableist.

Experts, whatever their creed, have been advising diets for centuries, and modern dietary advice has centred on fuelling the eating body and its organs as living machinery. Critiques of modern dietary advice call attention to the conflation of the empirical value of nutrition as an ethical pursuit (Biltekoff 2013), the flawed rhetoric of choice that presumes a neoliberal consumer to prevent so-called chronic lifestyle diseases at a population scale (Hite 2019), and the history of flattening and oversimplifying discourses into either-or food truths (Overend 2021). Specific to dietary advice from books penned by microbiome researchers, Stephanie Maroney critiques how “[a]dvice to ‘eat for your microbes’ reasserts normative ideas of the autonomous individual engaged in the work of managerial self-governance” which both 'embraces the multi-species human while continuing an investment in individualism and control' (Maroney 2020, 42). While these studies show the limits of prescribing a particular diet, we direct our critique specifically to the gut and how gut expertise gets conceptualised, constructed, and voiced.

Despite the growing chorus in gut discourses, gut microbiome research is nevertheless a nascent field. It is in this context of newness and hype that we focus on how HYH articulates the gut as a means to intervene on—indeed hack—broader notions of health and the type of politics to which this leads.

Structure of this paper

The remainder of this paper is divided into three parts. We first explain our methodology for studying this particular documentary and its messaging. We then present relevant patterns in HYH’s textual and visual data, which we have organised into (a) emphasising the sameness of all guts, (b) insisting on the difference in microbial composition, and thus (c) needing the prescription to 'always be counting' the number of fruits and vegetables one eats. The final section analyses these patterns in terms of healthism, an imperative for normalcy, and what we call 'a microbial decoy,' which allows scientific experts to remain in positions of authority.

Methodology

Our approach to HYH stems from disciplinary commitments to sociology, cultural studies, and critical food studies, based on our research interests in the materiality of bodies, foods, and microbes as well as the spatiality of environments, infrastructures, and food ideologies. We are both able-bodied, but at least one of us has a history of intestinal troubles that make some of the claims in HYH moot. We also have experiences with different degrees of precarity that make having an abundance and variety of fresh produce impossible year-round. One of us has studied so-called food deserts and has a particular awareness of assumptions about food security and access. From this position, we were initially inspired by a set of questions,Footnote 2 and have decided to focus this paper on how exactly HYH describes health in terms of guts and microbes, and how its claims build on or depart from modern health advice.

We conducted a close ‘reading’ of the film, treating it as a cultural artefact of an emergent gut-centric health discourse. We collected visual and discursive data through iterative viewing (Heath 2013), focusing on: the portrayal and construction of characters in the documentary (the who); the affective responses and takeaway message they construct (the what); the type of evidence called in to support claims about the gut (the how); the scenic constructions of authority attributed to the speakers portrayed (the why). We also conducted a discourse analysis of the documentary transcript through inductive coding to develop our underlying concepts and ideas.

With attention to visual and textual/verbal data, we developed seven codes—gut conceptualisations, new/old scientific frontiers, new/old dietary advice, problem/solution framing, affective responses, science communication of microbial matters, and discrepancies between what is made explicit versus implied or vice versa. We based these codes on the conceptual framework and intellectual work that Julie Guthman and Charlotte Biltekoff have been developing in their critiques on food, health, and technology-forward solutions (Guthman 2008, Guthman 2013, Biltekoff 2013, Guthman and Biltkeoff 2020, Guthman and Biltekoff 2022, Biltekoff and Guthman 2022, Guthman 2024). Based on extant discussions in relevant literature, we distilled these codes into three themes of healthism, reliance on scientific expertise, and a moral imperative to better one’s health. In line with cultural studies (Hall 1973, Fiske 1992), data collection around viewership and reception studies would have added a layer of complexity to our argumentation, but we deemed this out of scope of our current analysis. By keeping our focus on HYH as a cultural artefact of gut discourses, our data allowed us to make sense of the discursive meanings made through and with the gut and how health claims get constructed in contemporary media.

We focus on HYH as our singular case study given its exceptional shift in gut discourse from descriptive to normative, but we also see this film as symptomatic of larger, societal attempts to render the gut tractable. While we see this as another notch along a longer continuum of food studies’ approach to critically examining “what to eat,” we also find it necessary to draw attention to this dietary advice as a matter of prescriptivism that uses microbes as a decoy from its uncritical messaging.

The case study, the medium, and the message(s)

HYH combines light-hearted quirk with sombre moments of pain, shame, and exasperation in its 79-min run time. Colourful backdrops, hand-written section headers, and the occasional hand-felted puppet convey playfulness and approachability to the subject matter. Upbeat music, wordplay, sarcasm, banter, and casual conversations combine with stop-motion and 2D animations to explain complex laboratory experiments and show the effects of food/microbes on one’s gut lining.

Rhetorically, HYH combines an expository approach with a performative documentary style (Michael Moore exemplifies this well), where viewers are led to synthesise their own meanings from the various claims presented, be they scientific, anecdotal, or otherwise. Part of the film’s success lies in humanising four individuals (discussed below) and showing the greater filial context within which these people provision, prepare, and consume foods. In this sense, HYH jumps back and forth between scenes of Enders narrating food’s journey to/from the gut, scenes with one of the four ‘lay’ profiles, and a roster of (mostly California-based)Footnote 3 scientific experts who respond to questions, clarify confusions, explain the mechanisms for how guts work, or share and explain test results.

Like all media, the spoken and unspoken messages in documentaries are never neutral. By presenting information in an engaging, pleasurable, and entertaining way, HYH fulfils an 'epistephillic' desire where 'He-who-knows (the agency is usually masculine) will share that knowledge with those who wish to know; they, too, can take the place of the subject-who-knows [which] becomes a source of pleasure that is far from innocent' (Nichols 1992, 31). At the same time, the educational aspects of revealing 'the secrets of your gut' (HYH’s tagline) are committed to a realist style, one that is based on real people and empirical science; in turn, realism helps construct a sense of transparency where scientific validity stands in for objective representations of the known world and the documentary itself (Bruzzi 2000, 163). For performative documentaries especially, ‘truth’ includes acknowledging the artifice and contrived nature of telling a narrative, which, in HYH comes through in moments when documentary staff talk back to persons on-screen (e.g. when Tim Spector is corrected about the nutritional value of a fibre-promoting bar, 00:14:56). Compared to dramatisations with hired actors, the 'documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and effect impossible to the shimsham mechanics of the studio' (Hardy 1947, 101). Real characters and real scenes make better tools for interpreting the gut; and yet, aside from the opening sequence, all other gut viscera are replaced with felted figures of mice, microbes, and mucosal linings.

HYH does not follow the structure of distinct chapters or sections; instead, it flows from one topic to another and, when necessary, repeats motifs from earlier scenes to re-establish focus. In what follows, we outline the three rhetorical manoeuvres that mirror the way in which HYH presents information. First, we note the pattern of sameness: we are all the same in terms of each person having a gut, how that gut similarly digests food, and the shared problems our modern gut faces. Then, HYH highlights our differences: through showing four lay individuals, HYH exemplifies how each gut is microbially unique, where gut composition differs depending on life situations and lifestyle choices, which confer different microbes. Third, we note the prescription that HYH arrives at; regardless of our internal variance, the prescription remains 'always be counting' the number and variety of the plants one eats, so as to feed the gut’s microbes in an optimal manner.

Data

Sameness: 'Everybody looks the same on the inside.'

HYH opens with Enders assisting an endoscopy, with visceral shots moving through a faded pink tube—somewhere along the alimentary canal—spliced in to show viewers what the doctors see. One can imagine the sputtering sounds that such a medical procedure produces; instead, viewers are met with a calm voiceover from Enders explaining the journey through the gut, from oesophagus to stomach, small intestine to large intestine, and eventually the anus.

Concluding the endoscopy, Enders turns to the camera and repeats what her medical superior once taught her: 'See, everybody looks the same on the inside' (00:04:08). This is not true with disabled guts, for instance, as patients having undergone J-pouch surgeries, ileostomies, and colostomies have altered lengths and directions of the intestines. But here, ‘the gut’ represents a digestion machine—one that every body comes equipped with—breaking down the foods we eat into life-giving macronutrients. The opening scene collapses the variability and complexity of the gut into a vessel that we all carry.

Having established this baseline, HYH proceeds to diagnose the common condition facing eaters in the contemporary moment: all of us suffer from an industrialised diet. The issue is as pervasive as it is relentless, depicted with a fast-paced montage of burgers, sodas, and candy. HYH uses the industrialised diet and its threats as the opportunity to introduce viewers to a range of scientists who connect poor diet with poorly balanced gut microbiomes, assign fault to the modern food system, and explain the role of fibre in maintaining a healthy gut to keep microbes alive. Eating, explained here, is a shared project of digestion: 'We can’t digest on our own' says Enders (00:06:57); 'if we let [microbes] live on us, they’ll lend us their skills' (00:07:24). Gradual emphasis is placed on needing 'to feed your microbes' (00:20:25), through stop-motion animation of anthropomorphised microbial figurines showing the effects of a fibre-rich and fibreless diet. A third of the way into HYH, the threat becomes clear: failure to provide gut microbes with adequate fibre allows these microbes to turn against us and eat us from the inside out.

We all depend on microbes, but the biodiversity of these microbes is under threat with the modern, industrialised diet, which creates unlivable conditions for gut microbes. Microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg leverages the urgency of the matter through an extinction framing, which are accompanied by aerial shots of deforestation as a visual metaphor to reinforce the notion of multi-species loss. Eran Segal, a computational biologist, blames 'focus[ing] on the wrong thing' (00:38:11) for weight loss: instead of calories, we should be looking at which microbes are in the gut, such that a steady supply of ‘good’ microbes in the gut can ensure the right composition for optimal health. Thus, three clauses come together for the final punchline in a syllogism:

Claim 1. Since we all have the same mechanism for digestion (our gut);

Claim 2. Since we all suffer from an industrialised food system;

Claim 3. Since we all depend on microbes to metabolise our foods;

The conclusion is that we should all care about which microbes enter the gut and what is fed to them to keep both parties alive and well.

The impetus to feed and curate the microbes inside our gut then emphasises diet and, by extension, individual lifestyle choices. The insistence on diet comes from the scientific experts, based on two particular rationales. First, diet is seen as the thing one can change because 'you can’t change your genes' (00:11:47). And, more emphatically, health is seen as achievable 'through simple changes to our diet' since its effects are incremental and, if sustained in the form of a lifestyle change, can be lifelong (00:11:57, emphasis added). Compared to one-time medical procedures (like faecal transplants) or a probiotic pill, dietary changes are a low-stakes intervention that can be actionable and repeatable at the scale of individuals. As Jack Gilbert argues in the film, 'most probiotics you can buy in the store aren’t really gastrointestinal bugs' designed to live in our guts (01:07:03). Instead, through diet, 'everyone can be their own pharmacist just by picking the right foods to eat' (01:07:57). Neither Gilbert nor any of the other experts spell out what these 'right foods' entail beyond the broad notion of fresh produce, which differs from previous attempts to valuate foods, like with the so-called 'dirty dozen' of pesticide-prone produce or with a single-nutrient focus of produce rich in iron, vitamin B12, or antioxidants. Rather, the experts gesture towards a meta-level shift that disregards the materiality of (differentially abled) guts.

In the din of modern dietary advice, microbiome research cuts through the noise to produce one effective message: our guts are at the centre of disease prevention, microbes are the centre of our guts, and fibre is at the centre of feeding microbes well. Everybody seems to suffer from the same cacophony of what to eat: 'There is a lot of noise thrown at us' states a voiceover, while LeBron James, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jennifer Aniston tout health products in the background (00:01:27). Through all the confusion of marketing and abundance, the documentary argues, 'If you just look at the gut, all of this is easier to understand' (00:01:32).

Difference: 'Everybody has a unique microbiome.'

Turning inward to the gut, HYH demonstrates a pivot from 'we are all the same on the inside' to 'everybody has a unique microbiome' (00:11:17). The gut microbiome is the hallmark of difference and individuality, specific to an individual like one’s fingerprints. But unlike fingerprints or even genes, microbiomes are an accumulation of microbial encounters, from birth to playdates to everyday meals up to the present. Crucially, microbial composition hinges on frequent habits—like eating.

The uniqueness of a gut microbiome’s composition is made explicit through a cast of four members of the public. These lay individuals act as a contrast to the scientific experts, introduced in a compilation of Brady Bunch-style montages. The viewer is not guided through how these four were selected, and they are never shown in the same space. Each individual exhibits some food or health characteristic that differs from the rest. Ranging from obsessive, disordered, restrictive, and unmitigated eating patterns, HYH offers up a spectrum of relationships to food and eating—through Maya, Daniell, Kimmie, and Kobi—to illustrate how such habits shape our gut microbiomes. We detail each lay profile below.

Four different gut microbiomes

HYH first introduces Maya, 'the pastry chef who is afraid of her own food,' (00:09:20) who shares her history with anorexia, orthorexia, and the stomach pains that arise when she eats 'pretty much anything that’s not vegetables' (00:09:20). HYH highlights Maya’s fixation on wellness as an attempt to fix her relationship to food, with questions about whether she ought 'to spend $100 a month on supplements' (00:01:22). Like Maya, Daniell, 'the doctoral student with chronic gut pain' associates food 'with anxiety and pain and discomfort' (00:24:30). With photographs and a solemn voiceover, viewers learn how Daniell spent her undergraduate years eating candies and desserts, which, she explains, marked the start of her progressively getting sicker. Nowadays, Daniell has to limit her diet to ten or fifteen food items (00:25:30).

A stark contrast to the restrictive diets of Maya and Daniell, HYH then introduces Kimmie and Kobi. A Black entrepreneur, Kimmie, is shown as 'the mother who is trying to lose weight, and can’t' (00:09:40), making her the only case throughout HYH who is trying to lose weight. She states that she is considered morbidly obese, 'according to the world and all these graphs and charts' citing the flawed BMI calculation (00:35:51).Footnote 4 And despite diets, gym memberships, and weight loss medicine, Kimmie explains that nothing works for her (00:35:52). Meanwhile, Kobi 'the competitive eater who can’t feel hunger' (00:09:50) claims to have eaten nearly 10,000 hot dogs throughout his career. Kobi’s story pulls at viewers’ heartstrings as he describes his jealousy at the happiness and joy others receive from eating, stating that he no longer feels hungry or full, sometimes to such an extent that he doesn’t realise he hasn’t eaten in days (00:10:00).

Despite their unique stories and experiences, the individuals share their anxieties and confusion about their guts. Maya finds 'the food world and wellness culture incredibly confusing' (00:15:35) and, as she puts it, wants to decipher 'what [she] should be eating, or what [she] shouldn’t be eating, and what is healthy for [her] specifically' (00:18:15). Where Maya chases wellness via supplements, Daniell must take a regimen of supplements to maintain her baseline functioning. Daniell shares how she developed 'IBS-like symptoms' that she attributes to a diet of processed foods (00:24:44). Limited, deprived, and frustrated, Daniell confides to her mother how she feels stuck not knowing 'how to grow these new bacteria…that are required to…have a healthy gut microbiome' (00:26:13). Kimmie likewise has her own health concerns about diabetes running in her family and her desire to live a long life for her children. Kobi, who is Japanese, notes in particular that he believes it wasn’t just the competitive eating but the fact that he had 'eaten like an American' for his career that damaged his body (00:46:14). The four cases represent problems relatable to everyday eaters: which supplements to take, how to grow beneficial bacteria, how to lose weight, and how to tune in to satiety.

But these varying concerns funnel through the framing of gut microbiome research and excise all other complexities that accompany health, such as the built environment, food insecurity, physical activity and epigenetics, among others. As a microbiome issue funnelled through the gut, the interventions get brokered by new and additional scientific experts in such a way that they can fill in the gaps about how gut microbes can remediate their gut microbiome, and thus gut health.

To capture embodied (microbial) differences in a precise manner, the four individuals turn to commercially available testing kits. Whether this was prescribed by the documentary or freely elected and proposed by the individuals remains unclear.

Tests, apps, consultations

Only three of the four individuals are administered tests. While the brands are never discussed, brief montages show Floré and FreeStyle Libre, measuring microbial biodiversity and blood glucose levels, respectively. Test results are discussed via conference call with two members of the scientific panel who contextualise the results. After each consultation, the individuals are shown using an unnamed app on their smartphone, scrolling through different food options that are scored according to their personalised results. As the exact interface and technological platform are never disclosed, the viewer is left to see the app for what it is: a tool to hack their gut.

Scientific and medical interpretations of these tests connect individual microbial makeup and the lifestyles and habits that shape them. Maya, for one, is deemed 'pretty healthy' and 'above average' (00:33:05) in a private consultation delivered by Jack Gilbert (microbial ecologist) and Tim Spector (epidemiologist and medical doctor). Although Spector attributes Maya’s health to 'all those vegetables [she’s] been eating' (00:33:18), he corrects her that eating kale is not enough to be considered healthy and places emphasis on broadening and diversifying one’s diet. Some banter ensues with Spector and Gilbert encouraging Maya to 'micro-dose potato chips' in an attempt to curate a richer, more diverse microbiome and cultivate more species of bacteria in her gut (00:34:49). The fact that this advice was given to Maya after she had expressed concerns to Spector and Gilbert about her disordered eating alarmingly suggests that her histories with anorexia and orthorexia are being relegated to a lesser priority for microbiome hacks by microbiome scientists. After the consultation, Maya expresses misgivings about the scoring aspect of the app, explaining it is triggering and problematic given her history with anorexia and orthorexia. Nevertheless, it seems her gut biome—mediated by scientific testing and interpretation—has made itself hackable.

Kimmie is the only one who receives a diagnosis that names a particular microbial deficiency. Annie Gupta, a neuropsychologist, tells Kimmie that she has a 'less diverse microbiome' (less compared to what or whom is not mentioned), along with zero Prevotella bacteria, and low amounts of three other bacteria 'associated with the production of a specific type of gut hormone that makes you feel full' (00:42:46). To Gupta, this explains why Kimmie struggles to lose weight and why she is always hungry. Kimmie expresses awe, questioning: 'Why does it seem like… like I’m stuck? Am I stuck?' Gupta assures her, 'No, you’re not… you’re not stuck. So, the good thing is you got here, but you can also get out' (00:42:58, emphasis added). In so doing, Gupta’s response overrides Kimmie’s pathos with the logos of scientific studies and casts both the blame and the solution onto Kimmie herself. Together with Eran Elinav (a computational biologist), the two experts recommend that Kimmie mount a lifestyle change. Gupta tells Kimmie to 'ABCs, always be counting, not calories, but ‘always be counting’ the number of fruits and vegetables that you have per week' (00:44:15). Gupta states directly to the camera that between 20 and 30 is considered good, without mentioning how to reliably and consistently procure this bounty.

Despite Kobi’s fears, Annie Gupta and Giulia Enders relay that Kobi’s gut biome test results actually show that his 'bacteria actually looks pretty good' (00:57:50). Gupta attributes this to the fact that Kobi eats 'a normal healthy diet, Japanese diet,' claiming this has influenced his microbiome (00:58:02). But since the test did little to explain his lack of appetite, Gupta and Enders conduct an MRI to scan Kobi’s brain to shed light on the dulled sense of hunger and satiety. They conclude that Kobi’s career of stuffing American-style hot dogs has trained his brain to think he is always competing.

Inexplicably, Kimmie is subjected to the same brain scans as Kobi. Where Kobi’s brain was firing everywhere when shown food images, HYH shows that Kimmie’s emotional part of her brain was activated. Through Gupta’s interpretation of the scans, Kimmie’s 'ability to control these emotional responses are diminished' (00:52:45), but her diagnosis of emotionally-activated food habits goes unaddressed. Some of the stressors—of being a black woman, an entrepreneur, and head of a single-parent family—are left unacknowledged in lieu of a singular dietary message and a microbial mandate. Kimmie admits, 'learning the science' helped her know that she must eat more fruits and vegetables (01:12:43).

Daniell is not provided a test, without explanation, but our guess is that her narrow range of food tolerances means she cannot feasibly adopt the ABC diet. Rather than support Daniell’s difficult journey, the HYH experts leave Daniell to her own devices—in this case, repeated faecal microbiome transplants in her own kitchen—and use this as an opportunity to decry transplanting as what they call a 'blunt tool' in the face of more targeted, precision dietary advice brokered by individual stool samples and tailored recommendations from phone apps that 'improve health in a very specific way' (01:06:55). Leaving Daniell in the proverbial dust, HYH doubles down on blanket prescription that presumes everyone (else) can count their fruits and vegetables—and ought to.

Crucially, the business relationships between the tools for precision dietary advice and scientific experts go unquestioned. For instance, HYH uses Floré, which Jack Gilbert advises for. FreeStyle Libre, the glucose monitor, is part of the private precision nutrition company ZOE, co-founded and run by Tim Spector. Although ZOE is never named explicitly in HYH, its app resembles the user interface of what the four individuals scroll through when seeing their food choices scored according to their test results. So even though the documentary’s refrain to 'ABC' does not offer any radically new advice, this dietary advice comes from scientific professionals with financially vested interests in the products and technology platforms that they advise on.

Implicitly, the messaging of HYH shows that to fully appreciate the uniqueness of each gut, the appropriate ‘hack’ is to have science/medicine on your side, telling what one should uniquely eat. The whole premise of HYH demonstrates that what works for one gut doesn’t work for another, such that Kimmie ‘can’ eat a pork tenderloin, whereas Kobi ‘can’ eat avocado. Of course, they can each eat those foods without it having been sanctioned by apps and scientists, but HYH shows the lightbulb moment when app users see these foods in a new, scientifically mediated light. Scientists—and the apps they create or advise on—broker the permissions for which foods are deemed appropriate and tailored to the unique needs of each gut.

The prescription: always be counting

Neuropsychologist Annie Gupta prescribes: 'ABCs, always be counting' one’s intake of fruits and vegetables in a diet (00:44:11) and, while the other experts do not use the same phrasing, they all seem to insist on diet as a means to support the gut. Their advice uses microbes as the rationale for which foods to eat, overlooking all the other unique factors that impact food access and choice, such as zip code, income, and cultural heritage, among others. But, insofar as the documentary examines and performs gut discourses, ABC works as a gut hack because it is both a dietary intervention that feeds biodiverse microbes and a moral prescription to always endeavour to choose right. And, unlike calorie counting or knowing what counts as a serving size, the ABC diet is also easy to remember.

To emphasise the efficacy of this gut intervention, HYH dedicates one scene to a 60-ingredient smoothie to explain the microbial changes to a gut consuming this smoothie over time (01:08:05). Through data plots narrated by computational biologist Rob Knight, he describes how a colleague’s gut microbiome gradually increased in microbial biodiversity and shifted closer to the microbiome of a gut consuming a so-called pre-industrialised diet. The absurdity of the 60-ingredient smoothie is temporarily put on trial when production staff asks Knight from off-screen if he had ever tried the smoothie in question. No, he replies, and uses the opportunity to promote collaborations with chefs. The scene cuts to Maya, the pastry chef, who becomes tasked with replicating the 60-ingredient smoothie in her kitchen. Her reactions to its sheer volume (“this produce out here is about what I eat in produce for, like, a week,” 01:09:21) adds a pedagogical element: while 60 ingredients may seem like an exaggeration, establishing an extreme case of 60-a-day makes the ABC prescription of 20–30 per week more realistic and doable for people like Maya.

The smoothie scene also positions these particular microbiome experts above other kinds of medical experts who proffer gut-related knowledge, with jabs at modern medical advice on calorie counting (00:38:27) and inadequate fibre recommendations (0:19:20). Unlike previous instantiations of outsider expertise telling us what to eat (e.g. Michael Pollan’s 'eat real food, not too much, mostly plants' from 2008), HYH hints at the limits of dietary advice that is too broad. HYH posits that it is no longer enough to categorise ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, so the dietary advice of today’s guts needs precision. The diagnoses are specific (e.g. Kimmie’s Prevotella deficiency), and the implied solution is phrased in terms of a neat prescription (e.g. 'always be counting') which is further tailored to an individual profile (e.g. via an app). The ABC prescription hits the sweet spot of having precise microbial diagnoses with specific food recommendations while also skirting the social and political issues of how a gut—and the bodies who carry them—can access and afford such abundance.

The ABC prescription also frames gut health as the conduit for general physiological health by limiting its intervention to food and diet, excluding the built environment, environmental health, and epigenetics, even though the microbial component of each of these could have amplified HYH's messaging on the importance of microbes. In fact, even though HYH leverages gut microbiome research to highlight microbes’ purported role for improving mental health, it does not explore these environmental dimensions further, neither with the scientific experts (one exception noted below in a chocolate craving scene) nor the lay individuals. Thus, the hyper-focus on the gut and its microbial composition leaves much out of view.

Discussion

Theme 1: reinscribing healthism at the scale of individual gut containers

HYH locates health interventions at the scale of individual guts, which can be precisely analysed and acted upon. At the core of this intervention are lifestyle changes with the assumption that one can provision enough fibres to feed their microbes towards optimal health, aligning with Robert Crawford’s (1980) notion of healthism. A hallmark of healthism is responsibilising personal action as the means for attaining wellness:

Healthists will acknowledge, in other words, that health problems may originate outside the individual, e.g. in the American diet, but since the problems are also behavioural, solutions are seen to lie within the realm of individual choice. Hence, they require above all else the assumption of individual responsibility. (1980, 368)

Healthism socially constructs and culturally enforces a way of seeing health as personal (in)action, which, applied to HYH, reveals the presumed choice and control that one has over their health outcomes.

Crawford coined his term at a time when medical expertise was the source of objectifying patients. Science was understood to be objective (see next theme) so the individual focus of ‘healthism’ was in reaction to this reductionist ethos, in effect, to reclaim the personal narrative of individual experience. He suggested that movements like holistic health and self-help in the 1970s were responses to the alienation and isolation experienced from the modernisation of medicine (374). We see personalised gut interventions of today in a similar light, as a response to the clamour of dietary advice that has alienated eaters in recent decades.

The subtext of personalised medicine drives the documentary, emphasised by the four lay profiles where dietary advice for one (gut) cannot be mapped onto another (gut). But since the microbes within each gut differ, the onus falls on the individual eater to internalise and act on their own gut situation, to procure certain foods, prepare them, and consume them, consistently, in the form of a (hopefully permanent) lifestyle change. As with Crawford’s time, the individual emphasis remains a matter of taking personal responsibility (377), which we see in how HYH sets up consultations to adjudicate each person’s test and tabulate the moral value of individual choice.

Throughout HYH, the gut is rendered passive: it takes only what the human eater has procured and matter-of-factly digests it, which positions human behaviour as the pivot point for actuating health. Whatever agency is ascribed to the gut is assigned to the microbes there via the vagus nerve, which is a nerve that spans the gut to the brain and acts as a channel for microbes to send signals that tell the brain about cravings and mood. In one scene, a microbiome researcher justifies his purchase of candy using a microbial scapegoat: 'Today, my microbes win' (00:50:34). By not taking vagus nerve research seriously (when all other gut microbes are taken too seriously), we are left with a gut as a prop that reinscribes the human eater to make better choices. The potency of the message remains: you are what you eat, or, more pointedly, your microbes are influencing and influenced by what you eat, and it is up to you to ensure an adequate amount of nutrients reaches your gut and the microbes there.

A passive gut thus highlights an active human eater, driven by choice to gather the right amount, kind, and variety of microbes. We see this especially in the way that HYH presents an oversimplified representation of the gut, showing it like a container. The heuristic is not wrong; the gut indeed contains microbes. But the containment is temporary, given that our alimentary canals are tubes, where some microbes pass through and shift over time. (Some gut microbes can be eradicated altogether by medications like antibiotics.) By always referring to the ambiguous term ‘the gut’ (versus ‘alimentary canal’ or ‘gastrointestinal tract’) and by animating felted figurines against a dark, cave-like backdrop, HYH constructs the gut as a cavernous space for digestion. This fixation on the gut as a digestion space could explain why the interventions focus on what (foods) the gut can process instead of other eating practices, such as masticating (chewing well) or temporalities of eating (e.g. fasting). This, in turn, rhetorically emphasises the sameness of our digestive processes, the sameness of our gut containers, the sameness of our reliance on microbial diversity in the shared projects of co-digestion, and thus the same prescription applies to us all—it is just enacted differentially at the level of individual eaters and the choices one makes.

Whereas previous instantiations of healthism focused solely on individual behaviours, a new form of healthism fixates on an individual microbiome that, contrasted against genetic makeup (i.e. biological determinism), can become plentiful and diverse through behaviour. With this microbial rationalisation, choice reigns and separates the gut-wise from the gross din of dietary advice. No longer are gut diseases (like Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis) necessary for gut interventions. Instead, microbes act as the fulcrum for generally better health, such that HYH sees microbial composition as both the problem and the solution to the modern gut. In turn, this logic enables a microbial gaze that only some experts can mediate.

Theme 2: Scientific expertise as mediator/broker of health

By relying on the sterile, white-coat world of biological “facts” as an arbiter of microbial authority, HYH shows a new strain of healthism that propounds having science on your side.Footnote 5 Specifically, microbes are the new frontier for biomedically inflected dietary advice; they are the new ‘nutrient’ to secure insofar as fibre (prebiotics) and the ‘good bacteria’ (probiotics) steer eaters towards positive health outcomes. For instance, a Prevotella deficiency is discussed akin to an iron deficiency, whereby metabolic disorders like Kimmie’s obesity are explained in terms of particular (micro-)biological factors that further prognosticate towards a lifestyle change. People like Kimmie cannot seek out Prevotella bacteria unless mediated by scientific interventions and confirmed with future testing kits. Insisting on positivist framings of disease and health reiterates a critique mounted by Gyorgy Scrinis (2013), who argues that the ‘myth of nutritional precision involves an exaggerated representation of scientists’ understanding of the relationships among nutrients, foods, and the body’ (6, original emphasis).

Building on Scrinis’ categorisations (13), we see the gut ushering a new inflection of functional nutritionism. Early eras of nutrition advice depended on scientists in the mid-19th century but capitulated to voices in the food industry during the early 1990s so as to market, tailor, and engineer particular foods according to whatever reductive selling point they were trying to capitalise. Arguably, today’s focus returns to scientists by leveraging the gut as being in need of scientific intervention because the microbes inside cannot be brokered without their technoscientific expertise.

This return to scientised gut health shows two additional shifts since Scrinis’ nutritionism. First, where Scrinis notes the “deep complicity between nutritionism and the commercial interests of food manufacturers in the present era” (9), the complicity now runs even deeper, given the imbrication of microbiome scientists and their tech/app platforms. Unlike eating to monitor blood glucose or cholesterol or any other nutrient, eating for an invisible but somehow important roster of optimal microbes requires scientific and biomedical insights, which seems further monetised and privatised by technology platforms they own or advise for. Second, instead of nutrition experts per se with nutri-speak, the complexity of microbiome science ushers in a range of scientists with micro-speak, naming individual microbial species as if they were singular nutrients to gather for daily intake. But unlike the jargon of nutri-speak, this micro-speak has a farther reach. At least in HYH, these specialists make claims beyond the scope of their expertise, for instance, advising to micro-dose on potato chips to someone with a history of eating disorders. By emphasising the novelty of microbial interventions, the condensation of nascent microbiome science into an oversimplified and recycled dietary prescription seems to get waived as an eater’s responsibility in and through gut health.

Aiming for ‘gut health,’ in turn, enables scientific expertise to stay indispensable as microbial curators for healthy guts. Recall that there is still much to be learned about microbiomes in general, gut microbiomes in particular. From within the scientific community, even, some have voiced concerns that it is simply too early to be drawing conclusions. Even at the level of mouse studies, mice and humans differ enough in size, diet, and anatomy, such that ‘Findings from a mouse model therefore are not necessarily applicable to humans […] and might not simply transfer to human physiology’ (Bik 2016, 369; see also Eisen 2014, Walter et al. 2020). Even if microbiome research “is very central to being obese […] We don’t know how big is the part that it plays” admits Enders (00:08:47). Towards the end of HYH, Gilbert observes ‘compelling evidence but the science is still developing’ (01:04:48). Just minutes later, Gilbert laments how modern medicine focuses only on symptom management, while hinting at how microbiome research aims to delve deeper into causes and ‘the underlying problems that lead to it [disease]’ (01:07:01). Valiant though the effort may be, the subtext is that modern gut problems have outweighed modern gut solutions, enough to cast microbiome science as ‘a game-changer for medicine’ as Tim Spector declares (01:07:53).

Focusing on the gut as a site for medical intervention parallels what Ivan Illich (1976) considers an over-medicalised body in the modern era that, by diagnosing sickness, can subsequently monopolise (health)care. From Medical Nemesis, he argues: ‘Diagnosis […]isolates a person in a special role, separates him from the normal and healthy, and requires submission to the authority of specialised personnel’ (Illich 1976, 96). HYH sets up timely ‘hacks’ as means of taking control back into the hands of individual bodies and minds. But because this reclamation requires specific scientific expertise, eaters appear to re-submit ‘to the authority of specialised personnel.’ That these scientists become the enablers for ‘personalised’ control over one’s gut suggests a new obfuscation: no longer are individuals subjected to medical personnel at an institutional scale (e.g. as with 1960s mental health care in Illich’s time). Instead, eaters are equipped with scientised knowledge that implores them to act of their own volition, all the while being enmeshed with scientific personnel to interpret gut/microbial happenings.

The microbial aspects of gut health thus medicalises overall health, such that dietary advice from microbiome researchers appears more actionable, reliable, and cutting-edge compared to other dietary expertise. In fact, the allure of personalisable interventions seems so desirable that the prescription ‘always be counting’ is seen for its latent potential (one could hack their gut if they eat 20–30 types of produce per week) instead of being seen as a repackaged directive with added microbial flourishes. To be sure, the draw of microbiome science is that it brings together multiple specialisations in an attempt to capture complexity; yet, this trial-by-committee supplants all advice such that specialists can make general claims about food and eating. We see this logic arranged in a circular manner (Fig. 2), which self-perpetuates a microbial gaze that gathers momentum when framed as a game-changer and a hack.

Fig. 2
figure 2

The circular logic in HYH keeps gut health under the jurisdiction of scientific expertise.

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Theme 3: Moral, normal, and normative health

In HYH, the gut becomes the conduit for righting wrongs: the likes of disordered eating, irritable bowel syndrome, and obesity can all be ‘fixed’ back to normal through what these experts call ‘simple’ lifestyle choices. But because of its healthist framing, HYH conflates poor microbial composition (as an emblem of poor gut health) with a moral failing, further evaluated and decreed by an expert. In other words, experts diagnose poor gut health to individual eaters, who must take matters into their own guts to rectify decades of afflictions from a modern industrialised diet.

Using the medium of a documentary, HYH frames four diets to represent eating behaviours in moralising terms: eating kale is not enough because microbial biodiversity matters more than eating certain ‘good’ foods (Maya), weight loss is futile without certain ‘good’ bacteria sending ‘good’ hormones to modulate appetite (Kimmie), eating ‘bad’ food like hot dogs in extreme quantities can be fine if the base diet is Japanese and microbially rich (Kobi), and a disabled gut has failed a person to the point where no testing or prescription can be offered (Daniell). In each, the appeal to health hides a set of moral assumptions, whether in eating right, having the right body size/shape, or having the right access to knowledge or affluence to afford an abundance of fruits and vegetables. As with Jonathan Metzl’s analysis of health magazines and so-called buns of steel: ’Calling such language sexism or cultural narcissism would mobilise a particular critique. But calling it health allows these [discourses] to seamlessly construct certain bodies as desirable while relegating others as obscene‘ (Metzl 2010, 3 original emphasis). Applied to HYH, we can see how Kimmie’s case is framed as ‘obesity’ and ‘weight loss’ instead of environmental racism or classism, how Daniell’s DIY transplants are a ‘blunt tool’ instead of a tactic that ableism looks down upon, and how Maya and Kobi’s cases are considered ‘disordered eating’ instead of tokenism. This enables the term ‘health’ to stand as a euphemism for moral appraisals.

As scientific discoveries about the gut microbiome continue to mount, feminist philosopher Jane Dryden notes the pernicious narratives around cure and control when discussing microbiome interventions, especially those that target obesity and autism. Dryden makes explicit ‘the imperative of normalcy’ in gut microbiome research insofar as its emphasis on weight and behaviour undergirds healthist and ableist ideologies (2023, 132). Building on disability scholars like Joseph Stramondo, Dryden further interrogates the myth of cures and how microbiome research ‘assumes that curing [one’s condition] is morally required’ (Stramondo 2022, 1122 as cited in Dryden 2023, 134). Whether through fatness or neurotypicity, aberrant conditions are considered in need of interventions, so individual behaviours become the target for (re-)establishing normalcy. In so doing, the implied aim for health is an externally defined norm, one that is corrective and promissory (see also Friis et al. 2025).

We see the omission of Daniell from microbial testing and consultation as a case in point. Her gut condition makes the ABC prescription impossible, making her seem an anomaly within the normativity of the other lay profiles. Where HYH could have shown scenes of medical consultations for how to navigate her condition and treat inflammatory episodes with transparency and long-term care strategies, instead HYH shows her preparing a faecal microbial transplant in her own kitchen, with blended faeces portioned into empty capsules and placed in the freezer (‘with the ice cream,’ her boyfriend chimes in, 01:05:20). Her voice-overs explain how this is not her first time, and perhaps not the last. Visually and rhetorically, this scene serves as a cautionary tale for the viewer: here is a case that cannot be recuperated, strayed too far from normal, to the point where dietary interventions cannot save this gut. Without explicit explanations for why Daniell was not subject to gut testing or not offered a consultation, viewers are left to interpret on their own the reasons why her gut condition cannot be discussed, let alone ameliorated.

Normalcy is also constructed and construed. HYH aims for a presumed benchmark of health without ever defining what metrics it entails (besides not obese, not in mental distress, and not needing to perform DIY faecal transplants). Moreover, an ideal gut microbiome still hasn’t been defined in scientific literature. A recent review paper by Van Hul et al. (2024) moves the discussion only slightly forward, by elaborating on a gut’s ideal structure and optimal function in terms of balance (e.g. ratios of bacterial ecologies in the gut) or as a relationship between multiple parts (e.g. microbiota, gut lining, and liver). Nevertheless, they conclude that defining healthy gut microbiomes remains a ‘formidable challenge’ due to resource-intensive diagnostic techniques, difficulties disentangling correlation and causation, high variability across individuals, and the dynamicity of microbiomes over time and experiences (1905). So HYH never addresses what exactly constitutes a healthy gut partly because it cannot do so, scientifically at least,Footnote 6 but it proceeds to mobilise a litany of scientific studies (mostly on mice) whose sheer quantity can make it seem as if the human ideal is indeed known. Admittedly, one minor scene shows Jack Gilbert admitting that studies can only suggest a correlation with other samples from people reporting similar symptoms or embodying different characteristics (00:29:58). Yet this caveat seems minuscule compared to the rest of the way HYH is edited and narrativised to persuade four individuals (and by extension, all viewers) that one can—and should—eat their way towards better health.

In this sense, the normative dimensions to making the so-called right choice (for one’s gut) follow a much longer history of morally-inflected dietary advice. Looking at the turn of the 20th century in America, Charlotte Biltekoff’s research shows that implementing 'good nutrition' called upon 'good eaters' to adhere to guidelines that conflated moral righteousness first with religious purity and aesthetic moderation, then with upstanding citizenship and solid status in an emerging middle class (2013, 43). In Biltekoff’s words, “dietary assessment is inseparable from a moral hierarchy that is inevitably classed” (44), yet HYH does not address class relations.

We see the classedness of diet and the absence of its discussion as a reprisal of previous research from sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Bauman They argue that ‘foodie’ culture holds this contradiction: ‘foodie discourse is ostensibly about food, not social problems [but] it is precisely in everyday discourses like those about food that dominant cultural schemas about wealth, poverty, and inequality are reflected and reproduced’ (Johnson and Bauman. 2014, 153). It may be that foodie culture and the social distinction it confers is the modern extension of what Biltekoff describes as early domestic sciences (e.g. Ellen Richards of home economics in the early 20th century), promoting a moral tone to ‘eat right’ both to make oneself physiologically and to uplift oneself socially. Given that microbes literally make oneself over a lifetime of encounters, observing an ABC diet brings together physiological, social, and microbial mandates to ‘eating right’ and ‘self-making.’ With HYH’s expert panel railing against the so-called modern industrialised diet, the ABC diet offers a path towards a newer middle class with morally, microbially superior guts.

Combined: a microbial decoy

HYH brackets the gut as a standalone organ, separate from its organismal host, to focus on the microbes inside. This microbial gaze benefits from a kind of disembodiment, where removing the gut from the rest of the eating/moving/socialising body allows scientific expertise to proffer pithy statements like always be counting, without having to address the deeply political, environmental, and classed aspects of accessing fresh produce on a regular basis. Furthermore, healthism (in the form of individual food choices), reliance on scientific expertise (due to the difficulty of accessing microbial knowledge), and the imperative of normalcy (in the form of correlations between ‘good’ health and ‘good’ microbes) entwine and mutually reinforce one another to produce what we are calling a microbial decoy.

In HYH, microbes direct the gaze away from institutional, infrastructural, and structural changes, such as necessary healthcare, food systems reform, or even cultural expectations around work-life balance to sustain a plant-rich diet. Instead, HYH endorses the mantra of personal effort to seek out microbially mediated interventions. Curiously, the documentary’s focus on microbes through eating practices minimises all the other ways one can come into contact with microbes (with only mere mentions of vaginal births versus Caesarean) or other non-dietary ways that microbes can be made extinct (like antibiotic use). Concurrently, it also fails to elaborate on how contemporary food systems rely heavily on fungicides, pesticides, and other agrochemicals that annihilate microbes, let alone the pasteurisation standards, that eradicate microbes during standardised food production.Footnote 7 So, while the experts continually evoke the metaphor of microbial ecosystems inside the gut, the reality of microbial ecologies in-and-of our food systems, healthcare, and waterways falls by the wayside. As further evidence that systemic factors get framed out, we note how experts mention an assortment of life circumstances—‘whether you have pets, exercise, stress, your experiences when you were a child, whether you had adversity or not’ (00:10:34)—but never revisit them, or elaborate on which kinds of adversities people can face differentially. Although microbially related, these experiences cannot be hacked at the level of everyday eating.

Focusing on microbes obfuscates all other contextual, structural, or ideological aspects of health, which shields health advice from scrutiny. Furthermore, the focus on food (as microbial carriers) diverts attention away from healthist messaging whereby the cause of disease is not somewhere ‘out there’ but reaches deeper into one’s body, through their mouth and into the gut. As Crawford notes, this diversion may be precisely the point: the illusion of individualised control would be ‘contributing to the protection of the social order from the examination, critique, and restructuring which would threaten those who benefit from the malaise, misery, and deaths of others’ (1980: 368-369). It may be that, like fortifying the food supply in the modern era, dietary advice about microbes can categorically steer populations to consume larger amounts of produce without having to actually change the context within which these populations live. As Adele Hite (2019) explains in her study about the rhetoric of dietary guidelines in America, fortifying nutrient-poor foods enabled ‘a fix that would benefit food manufacturers and help prevent diseases of deficiency in low-income populations, but would not address underlying causes of poverty’ (80-81). Microbes are the shiny new tool (with monitors and apps) that allows one to hack their health, which outshines other social or political interventions that address the uneven impacts of food/health systems across raced, classed, gendered, and geographic lines.

Specifically, amplifying the importance of microbial diversity and abundance detracts attention from the how of food provisioning towards the how many foods an individual ought to choose in a week, without addressing who can afford and access those foods in a lifelong manner. A microbial gaze—enabled and promulgated by scientific personnel—directs discussions about gut health as a solely gut-and-food issue. As a decoy, microbes shift critical gazes away from community health, environmental health, and intergenerational health, such that gut-and-food discussions can proceed without addressing the contextual and structural underpinnings of each. More pointedly, the rhetoric of HYH seems to suggest that ‘microbes are everywhere’ and affect us all from industrialised diets to modern hygiene; yet, microbes that one can attain for health-promoting purposes seem to only exist in the gut, and nowhere else. This contradiction is troubling. Our concern is that insisting on food as a microbial intervention allows microbiome science to depoliticise dietary advice.

Conclusion

The gut, as the site to hack one’s health, is so de-personalised with an overarching (and untrue) explanation that ‘we are all the same on the inside’ such that digestion is presumed to proceed in a similar manner for us all. Yet it is re-personalised at the level of ‘you are what you eat,’ or more pointedly, ‘you(r gut microbes) are (a result of) what you eat.’ These microbes are the domain of new and varied scientific experts brokering insights for optimising (gut) health. HYH champions the health advice of ‘always be counting’ fruits/vegetables without attention to the context-specificity of how exactly eating bodies have the social, financial, or infrastructural wherewithal to procure, cook, and consume foods, repeatedly, over time to continually enact health. Access to food is presumed across all who eat, guts are essentialised as containers full of health markers, and diet is reduced to microbial capture. To answer Guthman’s provocation at the start of this article, HYH leads us to microbial hype at the cost of making diet apolitical.

Although healthism, scientific expertise posing as the pinnacle of truth, and normative ideals of healthy bodies are nothing new, an acute focus on microbes repackages the assumptions above—in the form of what we have called a microbial decoy. Because of the specificity of microbiomes, the allure of personalised health interventions obscures the fact that a dietary prescription of fibre has been recycled from decades past, just with a new microbial label pasted on. Individual microbiomes reinscribe healthist ideologies, but with a newer re-reliance on scientific expertise (contra Crawford’s time) to broker how microbiomes can be known and interpreted. In turn, microbiome research explodes the locus of expertise to include everything microbes touch, including food, and thus every body who needs to eat, where niche experts use micro-speak to re-specialise gut hacks (contra Scrinis’ analysis a decade ago) and re-submit bodies under the authority of science (contra Illich’s time). Lastly, the promise of cure and control to fix or elevate oneself frames microbes as the way to embody a proper roster in one’s microbiome—however ‘proper’ gets construed. Physical deficiencies of microbes disguise social and environmental discrepancies, which get further encoded as moral delinquencies. In each theme, the presumed novelty of microbes mobilises a narrow definition of health, even rendering the gut as the passive container that each human must actively curate. We also see a newly self-absorbed preoccupation with one’s health rather than a more collectivist notion of communal, intergenerational, or environmental wellbeing.

Our study has inevitable limits, both by its design as a case study and by its inter-disciplinary sprawl. With an eye to cultural studies and media analysis, future studies could compare the reception of HYH relative to other recent documentaries, including: Insight: Gut Feeling (2017, SBS Australia), The Gut Movie (2018, Brock, Australia), Fuel Your Health (2018, Pearlmann, USA), How Healthy Is Your Gut? (2021, Channel 4, UK), Know Your Sh!t (2023, Channel 4, UK), and You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (2024, Netflix). A mono-disciplinary analysis, such as in Science and Technology Studies, can also contextualise the role of expertise in scientific discoveries, especially in relation to authority and communicating science. The present paper does not empirically reveal any absolute politics through HYH, although future analyses could attempt to uncover specifics in localised contexts. Rather, the paper signals a change in the discourse that threatens to depoliticise food, dietary advice, and microbes in ways counter to previous scholarship. In this sense, our analysis is neither exhaustive nor the final word, especially since discoveries about gut microbiomes are imminent and underway.

In this paper, we analysed the documentary HYH insofar as it represents the allure of a triple hype between gut health, microbes, and novel food interventions. Its messaging propounds an individualist, classist, and solutionist approach to overall health via a dietary gut hack, with selective, sometimes circular, at times contradictory logic that keeps scientific expertise at the helm of brokering microbial knowledge. The microbial decoy that results, we argue, depoliticises foods and bodies that warrant renewed attention to guts as analytical and highly relational objects of study.