The Zoe test – how can it help make you a biohacker? We try nutrition testing kit that checks blood sugar and microbiome
- Zoe is designed to show you how your body responds to foods. The nutrition testing kit has tools for checking your blood sugar and the health of your microbiome
- We take the tests, try the app that interprets the results to suggest changes to your diet and eating habits, and ponder whether Zoe lives up to the hype
Without quantifiable data about your body and the way it metabolises certain foods, making changes to your lifestyle to counteract ageing – or so-called “biohacking” – may be a shot in the dark.
This was partly my reason for doing the Zoe test. I kept seeing people with yellow stickers on the backs of their arms, learned about Zoe, and wanted to gain insight into how my body really responds to foods.
Tim Spector, a British medical doctor and professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, launched Zoe in 2018. It is a personalised nutrition testing kit with tools for assessing microbiome health, which includes a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) – held in place by a yellow sticker.
Zoe has attracted about 130,000 subscribers and has 597,000 followers on social media platform Instagram.
The aim is to gain insights that allow you to stabilise your blood sugar and fat levels and boost your gut bacteria, which Zoe says is the key to achieving a healthy weight and improving long-term health.
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A big spike in glucose in the blood causes a big spike in the body’s production of insulin, which blocks fat burning and stimulates fat storage, according to Zoe.
Zoe is an investment: it costs £270 (US$340) upfront, which includes the gut microbiome test, the blood sugar and blood fat tests, biscuits and a blood sugar monitor.
Along with the test kit, you must also buy a subscription to the Zoe app, which costs £45 a month.
I paid for the kit in August 2023, but it was out of stock, so I was added to a waiting list and finally received it last October.
Its contents come in individual, clearly labelled yellow boxes. You first download the app, which is straightforward and gives clear advice about attaching the CGM to your arm.
I could not bring myself to press the button to spike the needle into my arm, so I asked my husband to do it. He ended up bending the needle. The company sent a new one within two days.
I pushed the new CGM onto my arm myself; the needle went in and did not hurt at all. Immediately I started tracking my blood sugar level and could see when mine was in range, peaking or dropping.
Checking your blood sugar does become bizarrely addictive, and I found myself checking mine throughout the day to see how I responded to different food combinations.
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I was surprised at the ways my blood glucose levels could be sent high, such as by eating a baked sweet potato with butter and olive oil, or a green apple.
I also got a spike running on an empty stomach – intensive exercise raises glucose levels because our cortisol triggers the liver to release stored glycogen – although that sort of spike is not considered a harmful one.
On the first day of Zoe testing you eat two biscuits for breakfast and two more for lunch. The breakfast biscuits are thick and rusk-like, with white chocolate chips – and contain over 600 calories. I am surprised to see they contain palm oil.
My blood sugar spikes, although not out of the guide range.
The lunch biscuits are coloured bright, royal blue, to enable you to understand your gut transit time when you do a blue poop. Zoe’s research shows that gut transit time is a key indicator of gut health, with shorter times generally associated with better health.
I kept waiting for my blue poop, but I never saw it. Zoe says many users never see a blue poo; sometimes the gut breaks down the dye.
After eating the biscuits you do a blood test, which requires a small, self-administered nick on a finger to get a drop of blood.
Then comes the poop sample, which you send off in a pre-addressed envelope with the blood sample.
During the fortnight you are required to wear the tracker, Zoe asks you to do daily “experiments” to see how your body reacts. For example, one morning eat pure carbs for breakfast (I chose porridge oats and water) and another day, pure fats (I chose an avocado) and then a combination of fats and carbs (I had a handful of almonds and porridge).
Zoe suggests working out before eating breakfast one morning, and on another day to work out after eating a breakfast of fats and carbs. Zoe is all about “flattening the curve” – that is, keeping your blood-sugar spikes to a minimum.
I have long been a no-breakfast person, but my blood sugar levels were much flatter when I ate a mix of carbs and fat before exercising.
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One habit I have maintained since trying Zoe is to mix my carbs with fats when having a snack – for example, having Greek yogurt with blueberries and banana, or eating an apple with peanut butter.
It takes six weeks to receive your results: two emailed documents, a 47-page dietary inflammation report and a 44-page microbiome analysis (long, but without much personalised information).
Mine presented no groundbreaking or life-changing information.
My blood sugar control scores 91, “excellent”, while my blood fat levels are “good” and my gut biodiversity is “excellent”.
The foods I was recommended to eat more and less of were predictable – more of those containing lean proteins and healthy fats, grains and leafy vegetables, and less of those containing refined carbs, and processed food.
I was in the upper 25 per cent of scores, with 121 species of microbes in my gut: my score was 83 – “excellent”.
“Generally speaking, higher diversity is better because you’re more likely to have some beneficial microbes in there,” says Zoe.
After getting the results you enter the final stage, which is maintaining better food choices – the app says it can predict blood sugar responses to foods and suggest ones which will keep you more level.
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I did not feel I was receiving much helpful insight.
A blood monitor and app is not going to take those steps for you.
I cancelled my app subscription.
