Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut’ on Netflix, a Documentary About Actual Poop, and the Emerging Science About It

From the Hey Who Knew We’d Be Talking So Much About Poop Today Dept. comes Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut , a slab of quasi-documentary Netflix content that roots around in our intestines and emerges with some compelling science about our relationship with food. Or, more accurately, it roots around in the intestines of four people with various health issues that could be managed with a greater understanding of the microbiomes within their bodies. It also features a serious doctor using the word “butthole” more than once, so not only are we being informed, but our inner eight-year-old might also be entertained.

The Gist: If there’s a “celebrity gut doctor,” it’s probably Giulia Enders. She’s the face of this documentary, a German scientist who’s extensively studied and written about the gut, and also is the aforementioned user of the word “butthole,” which sounds a little extra funny because of her accent. The use of that word helps establish the tone of The Secrets of Your Gut , which is not immune to the inherent and undeniable comedy of bathroom humor. In fact, one of the variety of gut scientists who turn up in this movie coins the phrase “repoopulate” while discussing a very new gut-bacteria treatment called a “fecal microbiome transplant.” Still, dung puns and the like aren’t necessarily incongruent to the seriousness of the film’s primary subjects, four people wrestling with some familiar and relatable gut-related health issues (and one that’s not at all relatable, but nevertheless fascinating from an objective perspective).

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And so we have Maya, a Michelin-starred pastry chef who’s struggled with anorexia and feels lousy if she eats anything besides vegetables and supplements – which means she can’t even eat her own delicious concoctions, like this crazy cake-tower thing covered with macaroons. Daniell is a psychology student whose lousy dietary choices now find her dealing with a host of digestive issues; now, she can only eat about 15 different foods that don’t cause her pain. Kimmie’s situation will sound familiar to many – she’s been labeled morbidly obese, and can’t lose weight despite trying a variety of diets, exercise regimes and medications. And then there’s the guy you’ve probably heard of, Kobayashi, the world-renowned competitive eater who’s wolfed down inhuman amounts of hot dogs and pizza slices, etc., and now, perhaps not to anyone’s surprise, no longer experiences feelings of hunger, and worries that his particularly narrow-niched career has damaged his body.

Some answers, per Enders and the other experts in this doc, might be found in the microbiome, the community of bacteria that lives inside the human body. Kind of like fingerprints, each of our microbiomes is distinct. Also to no one’s surprise, microbiomes of individuals living in industrialized society lack the diversity of bacteria we need to be healthy, which is the result of consuming processed foods. So doctors had Maya, Daniell, Kimmie and Kobayashi send them fecal samples so their microbiomes could be analyzed, and matched up with foods that will help them develop a wider variety of gut bacteria, and therefore feel better.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Secrets of Your Gut is similar to the not-quite-documentary movies and series that are piling up on Netflix, e.g., Live to 100 , The Mind: Explained or Get Smart With Money .

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Performance Worth Watching: Notably, Kobayashi shows little shame in horking down insane amounts of hot dogs in front of international audiences, and therefore apparently has no problem with a documentary crew following him into the bathroom to collect a dookie sample with a tiny little spoon. (Note, the film spares us the graphic details of this scene.)

Memorable Dialogue: Microbial ecologist Jack Gilbert reflects on how new the study of microbiomes is: “At the beginning of microbiome science, we were really our own guinea pigs. Myself and my colleagues were collecting our own poop and sticking it in freezers.”

Sex and Skin: All this talk of what comes out of butts, and not a single shot of a butt.

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Our Take: The Secrets of Your Gut doesn’t ring of pseudoscience, which is always the concern with stuff like this. Although it doesn’t delve into the tedious details of scientific studies, it also avoids giving us simple, easy answers to complex questions. It sometimes feels like a film your 6th-grade science teacher would thread into the projector so he can dip out and smoke a cig – lots of infotainment-style tidbits, and the kitschy stop-motion animation (which recalls, of all things, the Trolls movies) allows director Anjali Nayar to substitute real poop logs with googly-eyed puppets so nobody gets too grossed out here.

One of the key takeaways emerges in a sequence that illustrates how the movie’s four principal subjects’ body chemistries react differently to eating the same apple: There may not be a one-size-fits-all answer to concerns about gut health. It all comes down to our individual microbiomes, which can be analyzed (please pronounce this ANAL-eyezed, so I may join the poo-pun fun) for its deficiencies – for example Kimmie, who lacks bacteria that make her feel full, so now she can use this info to determine which foods will help her diversify her microbiome and develop a diet beneficial to her unique situation.

And so each of the four subjects has a different potential solution to their problems. One fascinating revelation is, our guts have a “second brain” that communicates feelings of hunger or satiation to the brain in our skull, leading scientists to conclude that the gut may be linked to a variety of health issues. Get a load of this anecdote: Daniell decides to try a fecal microbiome transplant, which requires – I’m not making this up – essentially consuming another person’s poop. Don’t worry, it’s not quite as gross as it sounds. We see her boyfriend take one of his dookies out of the fridge and drop it in a blender so it can be injected into caplets for easy supplementation. He suffers from depression, and when she takes those pills, she suffers from depression. She tried the same with her brother’s leavings, and ended up with his same issues with acne outbreaks. This is some thoroughly fascinating shitty science!

Oh, and one thing I feel obligated to mention: The scientists have one recommendation for every human being to follow – eat more plants. The fiber is GREAT for your gut. As my dad used to tell me, “Fonzie says eat your veggies.” And of course, what The Fonz says goes.

Our Call: It’s not quite the hard science of a top-notch PBS documentary, but Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut feeds us reasonably informative and useful shit in an easily digestible form. I apologize, but also urge you to STREAM IT, because you might learn something about newly emerging science.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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