I'll accept that there's a lot to be learned from stool, but I don't think this explanation has much to do with it:
“Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?,” Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer.”
Small, implanted labs-on-a-chip will eventually solve the data gathering problem. Software and lots of data (both your own and others suitably like you, where suitably is a thousands of times more specific than it is today) will identify the difference that are "normal" versus those that are "unhealthy".
This will upend the medical industry, which is one of the most inertial industries in existence. Worse, all the regulations that protect us will ultimately be used to protect it, in far worse ways than the whole RIAA/MPAA thing.
Hey! I have crohn's disease too. The way I discovered I had the disease, too late, was when my digestive tract starts to bleed blood. Ulcer was on a blood vessel.
I knew nothing about my body(and still don't) other than I am obese, need exercise, and my guts is in terrible shape. I hope this article, and others like it, will help jumpstart effort to measure my own body for science.
I'm surprised that there was no mention of gluten sensitivity and/or gut permeability as possible causes of chronic inflammation. While mainstream medicine is still not sold on the idea, I think the widespread anecdotal evidence merits further study and data-gathering. In my own case, I stopped having chronically inflamed gums when I gave up grains.
“Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?,” Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer.”