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Gut Healthism: The Penetrating Gaze and Depoliticising Forces of Direct-to-Consumer Microbiome Testing Kits

Zurawski E, Hey M (2025)

Sociol Health Illn · PMID 41157986

Abstract

In recent years, scientific attention towards the gut has interpellated everyday consumers to test and intervene on their gut microbiome in the hopes of improving their overall health. Based on a discursive analysis of direct-to-consumer testing kits, we detail how their rhetoric individualises health interventions in the name of procuring a 'healthy' gut microbiome while obscuring the social, communal and environmentally predicated relations that inhere to a kind of health reliant on microbes. Drawing on Robert Crawford's original conceptualisation, we identify an emergent 'gut healthism' amid the tangle of the contemporary microbiome revolution, technopolitical outgrowths of the Human Genome Project, collapsing healthcare infrastructures, and the ills of the modern industrialised food system. Through gut healthism, we argue that the kits enable a hyperfixation on the gut, which becomes mediated by scientific expertise to view and quantify microbes as health markers, whose gaze disembodies guts and depoliticises diet. By examining current moves in gut microbiome products, we also detail the divergences and complications that gut healthism brings to Crawford's framework, highlighting the problem with solutions such as DTC kits and how they do little to address the grand health challenges of our time.