 You have the microbiome you deserve is one of the first papers to be published in the new open access journal Gut Microbiome from Cambridge University Press and the Nutrition Society. The human body is a super organism that hosts a diversity of microbes. For years, scientists have explored this body scape to understand its makeup and its relationship to human health. While advances in genomics and computational science have provided some clarity, they've also made the field of microbiome science vastly more complex. Your microbiome is a menagerie of tiny organisms you've encountered throughout your lifetime, curated and shaped to suit you. The factors that control this shaping process include everything from genetics, family members and method of birth to your environment, diet and exposure to animals. But the innumerable ways that these microbes interact across the body may get incredibly difficult to understand the roles played by any one microbe or microbial community. That's a complicating reality for those seeking for a definitive link between microbial makeup and health, because the truth is microbiome scientists can't really say whether any microbiome is necessarily good or bad. They can zero in on aspects like diversity and richness and can even ID inhabitants and their functional genes, but rarely can they predict how microbiome changes will impact overall health. That exposes other limitations that scientists and the curious public must grapple with. Unlike in other fields of science, explorers of the human microbiome must rely on relative quantities, measuring numbers of microbes in relation to other microbes, and it's difficult to ascertain what any gut microbiome actually looks like as fecal samples likely offer only a partial census of microbial populations. Standardization of methods could help scientists address some of these limitations, but the link between microbiome status and overall human health and disease is not likely to be clarified anytime soon, even as popular reports suggest the opposite. Microbiome science, like any other scientific discipline, advances incrementally, driven by testable hypotheses and rigorous analysis. There is no shortcut, unfortunately, toward improving health through the microbiome. But there is plenty to be excited about. Growing evidence, for example, shows that disease states can be replicated between animals through fecal transfer. Understanding the mechanisms that make that possible could lead to significant breakthroughs in treatments for certain diseases. So, while expectations should be carefully tempered, microbiome science offers much to look forward to, and will undoubtedly enhance our understanding of human health and well-being.