Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Full disclosure: I received both a 23andMe test and an Ancestry.com test for free through the Amazon Vine program at around the same time. So, I really got to use and compare the test results and the memberships. There is a huge difference. The Ancestry.com test costs $100 and this costs $250, but this is so far superior in every way that it is extraordinary. However, the two sites really serve different purposes. I did not really need any ancestry information. I am of Ashkenazy Jewish heritage (Eastern European) and there were no skeletons in my family’s closets as far as I know. I am a third generation American, not an American whose roots are deep and certainly filled with unknowns as this is a land of immigrants (and natives, of course). If you are looking for things like naturalization papers and other public records, ancestry.com is the place for you. Their info about different groups of people is rudimentary in the extreme. 23andMe have not only considerably more information (and quite in depth to boot), but their interpretation of your results is more refined. I found out that I have a little mystery in my heritage from this test. The other one? They said I was 100% Eastern European. I have read that all these companies use different ways of interpreting these results. This one is more sophisticated. I could stop the review here, but let me go on. . . I had a DNA test that cost $5000 because I had a rare cancer. For $250, I could have gotten the SAME result that they were looking for with this test! Now THAT, I state emphatically, is a good reason to choose this company. So, I paid (out of pocket, mind you) a lot of money to find out something that changed the course of my cancer treatment. The fact that I may not have had to do that floors me. And I had something to compare it to. If my defective BRCA2 gene didn’t show up in these results, I would have come on here and told everyone to not buy one of these kits. But it did, along with some pretty good info about what that means. Which brings me to a caveat, which will not effect my giving this kit and the website five stars: Be forewarned. If I had found out about having this defective gene solely from using this site, I don’t think I would have understood how serious it is. Yes, they give you information here, but honestly, this kind of actionable medical information is best processed and understood with the help of a genetic counselor. I know about the BRCA results. If you test positive for those, go to a doctor and tell them. I suspect that the same could be said of many of the other health results, but I have no personal experience with them nor do I feel qualified to give medical advice. The health results you will receive are thorough, wide-ranging, and a bit overwhelming. Some of it is harmless fun, like finding out if you have a propensity for salty or sweet snacks (who knew?) Others are truly serious business, such as what I wrote about above. I suspect most people will not read the health info in depth or be able to wade through it. Their website is quite thorough, admirably so in fact. So, that is my take on it. This is the test you want to get if you are curious about health propensities. It’s quite important if you don’t know your family’s medical health history. In fact, that is really vital, and so I unabashedly say get this one and maybe, if you are looking for records and other people’s family trees or simply want to know a more general bit of info about where you came from, spend less on the other. But this is a bargain, and it could be a life saving one at that. Just please read all the information and if any of it worries you, go see a doctor. Well done, 23and Me. It really is a very interesting site, especially for info geeks like me!