Brokering the gut: microbial decoys in the documentary Hack Your Health

This paper analyses the documentary Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut (2024) as a case study for how guts and gut health are perceived and discussed in modern dietary advice. By ‘reading’ the documentary as a cultural object, the paper examines the politics that gut-related discourses produce when research in gut microbiomes continues to swell. Situated at the nexus of sociology, cultural studies, and critical food studies, this paper scrutinises how the increasingly complex interconnectivity between guts, microbes, foods, environments, and embodied politics gets smoothed into one neat dietary prescription: ‘always be counting’ one’s fruit and vegetable intake. The prescription itself is nothing new (i.e., eat more produce), but what emerges anew includes themes such as reinscribing healthist ideologies at the level of individual guts, elevating scientific expertise as the sole arbiter of gut hacks, and moralising guts in a normative frame. Throughout these themes, we find that microbes serve as the underlying rationale for this dietary prescription. We develop the concept of microbial decoy to describe how microbes are used to detract attention from systemic issues of food provisioning to focus on individual action. Namely, microbes divert attention away from the ‘how’ of food provisioning towards the ‘how many’ foods one chooses in a week, without addressing who can afford and access those foods in a lifelong manner. The paper contributes to theorising the gut, the microbes it houses, and the power relations that come with assumptions about gut health. The conclusions about microbial decoys could further discussions in medical anthropology, critical dietetics, and the social study of microbes.