Everyone’s body is different, and there is no single approach to nutrition that suits us all. Naveen Jain thinks it is time for our diets to be hyper-personalized, and with his company Viome, provides a way.
Viome. A company pioneering microbiome testing and personalized nutrition.
What if our health outcomes are not so much pre-determined by our genome, but rather by the food we eat and the 5 trillion microbes that inhabit our bodies? Why is it that diets that work for one person don’t for the other? Is fasting, high-protein, gluten, low-fat diet good or bad? The best medical science has been able to do up to this point is large-scale studies taking averages across huge populations. But what if the needed solution is hyper-personalized? The solution may be Viome microbiome testing.
Humans have about 22 thousand expressed genes, while the earthworm has about 30 thousand. How can it be that we, the super organism, are less complex than the worm? One clue is that our complexity may not be from a limited amount of expressed genes, but rather the 40 trillion organisms living within us.
The information here was gathered during our interview with Viome founder and CEO, Naveen Jain. Naveen will be a featured speaker at YBL, June 11 in Los Angeles. Buy your ticket here.
As the Viome site states:
“We use the advanced technology developed for National Security at the Los Alamos National Lab to identify species and strains of all organisms (bacteria, viruses, fungi, phages, yeast, parasites, etc.) in your gut, assess how active these organisms are, and analyze whether they are producing nutrients or toxins from the food you eat. We feed all of this information to our state-of-the-art artificial intelligence engine to recommend the exact foods you should be eating and foods you should be minimizing with the goal to keep your gut in balance.”
It seems we are a walking talking ecosystem; that we have very cleverly outsourced much of our functionality to the 5 trillion microbes that live in us. Why do all this internal work, breaking down of roughage and such, when we can get other organisms to do it for us?This was a fine plan until we entered the modern age with antibiotics and other microbe-killing drugs entering the picture. These drugs have saved untold millions from infection, but they have also damaged the essential organisms of our microbiome.
“Now, rather than dying from infections, we are dying from chronic diseases: Alzheimer’s, obesity, heart disease, cancer — all of which are thought to have a component of inflammation due to a poorly-functioning gut,” says founder Naveen Jain.
Our moonshot is to understand the human body at the molecular level and apply cutting-edge technologies to make illness optional.
Which brings us back to the ancient Greeks and Hippocrates who said:
“All diseases begin in the gut.”
”One man’s food is another man’s poison.”
“Let food be thy medicine.”
The question for millennia has been: Exactly what food should we eat? Specialized diets seem to work for some people, but not everyone. We are left with either mass studies or small anecdotal ones. Our DNA is 95% similar, but our guts have only 5% commonality. What we need is personalized dietary direction based in personalized science.
We here at AGEIST have long believed food is medicine and are very excited to see how the Viome program works. We have taken the initial Viome test and are awaiting the results. As we go through the process, we will keep everyone informed.