The Wildbiome Project 2

Have you ever wondered what happens to your body when you eat wild foods? I’m Mo Wilde, a foraging teacher. We’re currently fundraising to include between 100 and 120 people in the second study of The Wildbiome Project 2 which starts on April 1st 2025.

To read the headline results of the 2023 project click here.

In 2023, I ran a citizen science study of 24 people living only on wild food!

Why? Well, during lockdown, I lived for a whole year on the free, wild food found in Central Scotland and did gut microbiome tests. Living entirely off foraged food had a profound impact on my gut microbiome and health – mine and that of my friend, Matthew Rooney, who joined me on this unusual diet. Our gut microbes became very responsive to different foods. I returned to a healthy BMI and Matt, a type 2 diabetic, regained pre-diabetic blood status in just 9 weeks.

However, a study of two crazy people doesn’t make good science. So in 2023, I was joined by fellow members of the Association of Foragers in a citizen science research study. 24 of us ate only wild food for 3 months (Cohort A) or just 1 month (Cohort B). We were monitored against a reference control of 24 people eating normal shop-bought food. What we wanted to know is “If you are what you eat, what happens when you add something wild?”.

Dan Saladino (The Food Programme, BBC Radio 4) covered this in the summer of 2023 and will be covering the 2025 project also.

Sadly, scientific testing doesn’t come cheap and we need your help to fund further tests for 2025 participants. These help us assess the impact on microbiome composition and key health parameters of people eating an exclusively wild food diet. We are committed to publishing peer-reviewed results in an open-source academic journal (2023 under peer review at the moment), so that many more people can benefit from our insights. This all costs money even though all the volunteers are doing this for free.

Your donation will help this unique opportunity to track the impact of a foraged diet. This study is important as it will make a huge contribution to what we know about the indigenous western human gut microbiome and how significant the loss of wild foods might be for our diet. Please help me raise the funds we need whether it’s the price of a pint or a coffee, or a generous corporate gift!

Our first target is £34,000 to buy Gut Microbiome and Nutrition Status Tests for 50 participants to do at the start and at the end of the project. A further £34,000 would let 100 volunteers participate. If we go over the target of £68,000 anything further would help fund a researcher to write up the results and pay for the submission of the academic paper. All my time on this project has been given freely since 2022. I promise that anything surplus will only be used for this project.

You can follow our progress on social media. We’re using the hashtags #wildbiome and #thewildbiomeproject or, if you’d like to read more about a year living wild, my book ‘The Wilderness Cure‘ by Mo Wilde is available in bookshops.

Please give generously to our project and make a donation. Thank you.