In the last few months, we’ve expanded from one single, first-class gut microbiome test into a new and improved therapeutic platform with our new Health Intelligence Test. We’ve integrated new scores on our Viome App that explore new tantalizing results right at your fingertips - quite literally. With a small finger prick sample, we now have the ability to assess your blood transcriptome and get a more in-depth picture of how your gut microbiome is affecting the rest of your body. But what does that really mean for you?
The subtle variations and out-right blatant differences that make our gut microbiome unique can have a daunting impact on our health. And with good reason!
Your gut ecosystem says a lot about how you digest food, absorb nutrients, and how well your body measures up against chronic disease. It’s a complicated system, but the microorganisms living inside your digestive system have created a symbiotic relationship with their environment - you! Your body provides them a safe haven to thrive, rich with nutrients. In return, they help breakdown difficult-to-digest fibers that support a healthy gut lining, and ease the absorption of many essential nutrients. Some bacteria even go a step further and generate vitamins that support normal functioning of our cells.
With a healthy gut microbiome, our ability to process foods and uphold the integrity of our digestive lining increases - preventing toxic byproducts and foreign microbes from migrating into other regions of our body they don’t belong. However, when our gut ecosystem isn’t balanced, it can affect more than just how well we digest our food. It can develop into more serious conditions that degrade our digestive lining (like leaky gut syndrome) and promote inflammation and invasive microbes that stimulate harmful biological consequences. These effects can influence our health by changing the way our food impacts our body. In many scientific studies, researchers have drawn connections between nutrition-related conditions like obesity, diabetes, and bowel disorders (IBS, IBD, and Crohn’s).
Follow the science, not the crowd
In recent years, we’ve even seen a number of studies that have also linked an unhealthy gut with neurological conditions, mood disorders, inflammatory diseases, hypertension, cancer, and many others. It’s not hard to see all the potential benefits of stabilizing and optimizing your gut health.
But now we have transitioned into a service that offers a true systems biology approach to precision nutrition, using advanced AI Intelligence and our very own team of Translational Scientists and Clinical Nutritionists. With the combination of our Gut Intelligence Test (using a stool sample of your gut microbiome) and our new Health Intelligence Test (that includes your blood to track how your gut microbiome may be affecting the gene expression in your cells) we’re taking a whole new holistic approach toward your health with an actionable plan to help you improve it.
Now, there is even more information packed into your individual results. It’s more than just categorizing different foods to ‘Avoid’ or ‘Minimize’ - there is specific insight into your own personal biology that can shed light on your health journey. From personalized supplement recommendations to revealing your true inner age, here are just 10 of the many things we can tell you based on your own personal test results:
1. Inflammation from your gut may be impacting other parts of your body.
The very foundation of our assessments begin with understanding who is present inside your gut - and what exactly they’re doing. In your results, you’re not just given a complete list of every microbe we found in your sample - we assess how they’re contributing to your health and level of inflammation.
The more active types of microorganisms you have, the more beneficial functions are taking place. This can directly be linked to your gut’s ability to overcome conditions that promote inflammation. And when you have inflammation in your gut, it has a bad habit of leaking out into other areas of your body. You can feel these symptoms manifest as fatigue, skin issues (like eczema and rosacea), gum disease, and even depression.
Our gut analysis portion of the test shares over 20 different scores to get down and dirty with the health of your gut lining, including a comprehensive analysis of the level of inflammation inside you.
2. That inflammation might be caused from some unexpected sources—including viruses!
Sometimes the foods we eat - even nutritious ones - can have uncomfortable side effects on our day-to-day life. If our body isn’t fully equipped to break them down, even some of the “healthiest” foods out there can cause bloating, cramping, and gas. But there are other agonists that can cause inflammation in your gut.
At Viome, we identify where the source of your inflammation stems from, whether it may be an increase in histamine interactions, problematic bacteria, high levels of cellular stress, or other concerns. We see just about everything that’s hanging inside your gut (and blood transcriptome) and each agonist can have a profound impact on your immune system. But better yet - identifying it means giving you the power to use actionable recommendations that help you get to the root of your inflammation.
Need an example?
Viruses are well known to make us sick, and can be difficult to shake - but did you know that it’s not all that uncommon to find viruses living inside your gut microbiome? True to its name, the gut microbiome includes not just bacteria, but many other types of microorganisms inside you - like archaea, fungi, and yes - viruses!
One of the common viruses we find is a type of blueberry virus that can promote inflammation inside your body every time you consume blueberries. So even though blueberries are rich in antioxidants and great in pancakes, your personalized recommendations may alert you to move blueberries to your ‘Avoid’ group and swap out for other berries like raspberries and strawberries. Sometimes you just don’t know until you know!
3. What you should actually eat if weight loss is your goal.
We all have different goals. For some, keeping a healthy weight may be what’s driving your New Year’s resolutions. After months of social distancing at home, it’s safe to say it might be on a few of our minds…
Losing weight doesn’t have to mean counting calories or eating a strict diet of lettuce and water. In fact, you may find many foods you thought to be healthy for you land on your Avoid list. Following a diet designed for you has many benefits, one being supporting a healthy weight. Many of our customers find weight loss to be a natural side effect even if it wasn’t an initial goal. Viome is first and foremost, your most scientifically-backed precision nutrition service. Our dietary recommendations are catered to your precise goals and help alleviate the trial-and-error approach of fad dieting, which can often do more harm than good. Built upon whole foods and their impact on overall health, we focus on getting you - and your gut - back to optimal health to promote a healthy metabolism and a healthy weight.
And once you have your personalized results in hand - take a quick trip to our Recipe Facebook Group and get Viome-inspired Recipes and Meal Planning ideas!
4. If your gut microbiome is impacting your risk of kidney stones.
There are many ailments that can be traced back toward how healthy our gut microbiome is - and a few of them might surprise you. If you suffer from kidney stones, you may find that your gut microbiome isn’t exactly helping you ease the problem. Many healthy and nutritious foods contain oxalate - which ordinarily isn’t much a problem. Nestled inside our gut ecosystem, oxalate-digesting microbes get to work and help metabolize this hard to digest compound. But if your gut microbiome results show low levels of these microbes, it might mean your body is accumulating large amounts of oxalate and increasing your risk of kidney stones.
If this is the case, you can expect to see foods like spinach, rhubarb, beets, and even nut butters on your ‘Minimize’ or ‘Avoid’ list until your oxalate-digesting microbes beef up in number.
5. What’s keeping you down.
It’s well documented that there is a direct line of communication between our gut and our brain. Known as the gut-brain axis, it includes the vagus nerve that sends electrical and chemical signals to and from the brain. Researchers have found that our gut microbes are also heavily involved in many of the signals that are dispersed, even to the degree of ‘controlling’ them.
Some studies have shown how symptoms of depression can be closely related to disrupted signals between the gut-brain axis. For example, our ‘happy’ chemical - dopamine - is an essential neurotransmitter that helps improve mood stability. But did you know that 50% of the dopamine in our body is actually created inside our gut? And - if you didn’t know it - we can thank our gut microbes for contributing to its production.
From your results, we see a lot of different things, including your serotonin (90% of it produced by your gut), GABA, and dopamine production. This can tell us a lot about how your gut health may be impacting your mental health.
If your gut microbiome is suffering or imbalanced, it can harm the level of neurotransmitters produced in your body. With that said, there has been additional research linking gut microbiome to mental health from invasive inflammation. This shows a multifaceted opportunity to battle depressive mood disorders on many fronts.
6. How resilient your immune system is.
Part of the perks of our new Health Intelligence Test, is taking a good, long look at your cellular health and other aspects of your body. One of the best ways to be healthy, and stay healthy, is by supporting a healthy immune system. And this goes both ways - no one wants an underactive immune response when trouble starts, but you certainly don’t want an over-active one either!
In your results, you’ll find scores that break down the level of inflammation inside you, as well as how active your immune system is.
To keep your immune system right where it belongs requires keeping it right in the middle of activity. Learning where your immune system falls on this scale can help us determine whether issues in your body are stemming from too little or too much immune system activation.
Thus, your scores can translate to more precise recommendations, like whether you need anti-inflammatory nutrients in your diet (like turmeric), or if you need nutrients that activate the immune system in a positive way (like beet extract!).
7. Why you’re always tired, no matter what you eat.
Ah, the age-old question - why am I always tired?
If you plan your day around how many cups of coffee you had, or whether you can fit in that afternoon nap - you might have issues with your mitochondrial function. Your little mitochondrial ‘powerhouses’ have a lot to say about your energy levels - and they do more than just create our energy currency (in the form of ATP). Your mitochondrial fitness can also determine how responsive your body is to worn-out cells that need replacing. So if even if you’re eating ‘all the right foods’ and making great improvements to your fitness journey, without properly supporting your mitochondrial health you’re most likely missing out on a key way to optimize your energy, metabolism, and aging.
In your results, you’ll find comprehensive scores that measure your mitochondria’s ability to produce energy and how well they regenerate. Depending on your results, your mitochondria may require some extra attention and benefit from specialized supplements uniquely designed to boost their healing potential and get you back on the road to an improved recovery post-workout.
8. How your diet might be making you age faster.
Technically, Viome is 5 years old - but we feel a lot older. That’s partly because your chronological age doesn’t always reflect how you feel. Your diet and lifestyle have a major impact on how you age internally and as a result, externally.
Despite hitting all your ‘daily needs’ - it’s more than possible that your cells are underperforming. Why does this matter? Underperforming cells can also mean cells bad at healing, bad at functioning, or even, bad at living. These can be tracked by various testable biomarkers that change based on your personal diet and lifestyle.
In some cases, your diet might not be helping you fight the aging process. And despite how ‘young’ (or old) your chronological age may be, your biological age may be a lot older. That can lead to a lot more physical signs of aging (like wrinkles) to internal signs of aging (like reduced organ function). There’s good evidence that aging is the number one risk factor for most chronic diseases. If we can see not only someone’s chronological age but also their biological age, we can gain more insight into an individual’s future risk of developing diseases overall or even organ-specific diseases.
If you want to start feeling like you’re living in your prime no matter what year it is, optimizing your health and maximizing the benefits of your diet are your way toward feeling like a spring chicken. Because let’s face it - you’re only as old as you feel.
9. How stressed out your body is.
Stress is a normal part of life. In most cases, stress can make us stronger and more resilient toward whatever life throws at us - whether that’s a terrible boss or (heaven forbid) a coffee shortage.
However - certain stress levels shown inside your cells might be an early warning sign for a number of health conditions. This is one of the reasons why we included a score for Cellular Stress in our new Health Intelligence Test. But just where is all that stress coming from?
The truth is, it depends. There are a lot of factors that can cause your cells to get stressed out, but your samples provide a lot of information about contributing causes. We can see all sorts of information, including your levels of oxidative in your cells. We can also see how your gut microbiome may be producing toxic or inflammatory stress-inducing byproducts (e.g., putrescine, ammonia, cadaverine). In addition, if you consume a high salt diet - there are signs that may suggest ‘salt stress’ signaling. We don’t just see how stressed out your cells are, we can actually pinpoint what key factors might be causing it.
From there, if your score is suboptimal, you might find varying recommendations related to your particular results. If your Cellular Stress score suggests you have a build-up of harmful free radicals in your cells, you may have a heavy antioxidant protocol embedded in your dietary and supplement recommendations.
10. Which supplements and probiotics you should be taking and how much?
Probably the most exciting part about our new Health Intelligence Test is our ability to provide truly personalized precision supplements, probiotics, and prebiotics. We’re not just talking about a generalized multivitamin you can pick up at your local convenience store or even a probiotic that works for some and not others...
Only Viome takes all your scores and compares them to your individual goals, medical history, and list of your prescriptions to provide you the most specialized vitamin and supplement formula completely tailored to you. No more time or money wasted ‘feeling’ for results you believe should come. Our precision supplement line is created with you - and only you - in mind.
With over 250+ premium ingredients and a combined list of nearly 50 probiotic and prebiotics we choose from, you’re not likely to share the same formula with anyone else. Moreover, we never hand in the towel. When it’s time to check back in on your health, your recommended food and supplement scores may change depending on the way your body functions and feels. With regular testing, our technology allows us to make adjustments to your recommendations and fine-tune them in a dynamic way that is unique to your biology.
All in all, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what you can expect to learn from your results. And better yet, we’re still committed to progress and giving you the best our precision nutrition has to offer.
Trust us, we know there is a lot of information in your results. That’s why we offer a ton of ways to learn about all the things you’ll encounter through our integrative App. And, If you’re interested in learning more about our new line of precision supplements, you can also find more information in one of our new articles. In addition, can also peruse our new score guide that simplifies all the information you can glean from your unique results. It’s a lot, but it’s what you deserve when it comes to tackling your personal wellness goals.
Find what you can learn and see what your Health Intelligence Test results say about you - and experience what it truly is to Decode, Activate, and Optimize your health with Viome.
he information on the Viome website is provided for informational purposes only and with the understanding that Viome is not engaged in rendering medical advice or recommendations. Viome provides this educational information to share the exciting developments being reported in the scientific literature about the human microbiome and your health. Viome products are not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
